Abstract

n organizations in general, cooperative behavior across functional units is increasingly essential with the adoption of total quality initiatives and self-managed work groups. Within the Information Systems (IS) function, cooperation across and within functional boundaries remains critical. In today's organizations, Information Systems personnel (ISP) and users collaborate in a variety of ways (e.g., business process reengineering, shared responsibility for information centers or end-user computing, joint application development, development of chargeback schemes, and distributed computing). Information Systems personnel routinely contribute to team projects that span departments. For example, informationengineers, database administrators, and systems analysts work together during various stages of database application projects. Within IS, the frequency of day-to-day activities that span departmental or functional boundaries (e.g., teamwork, shared responsibilities, and consultative activities) is unusually high. In these boundary-spanning activities, ISP need to exhibit a high degree of behavior not explicitly detailed in formal job descriptions; this type of behavior is labelled "extra-role". Additionally, many IS positions, comprised of a wide range of activities, offer unique opportunities for extra-role behavior because these jobs, often professional in nature, operate under significant autonomy. Given this combination of high need and latitude for extra-, or pro-, role behavior in IS, we argue that it is imperative to understand this behavior. To support research in this area, this paper defines the construct, Organizational Citizenship Behavior, which has been used in organizational research of extra-role behavior, discusses how this construct could describe behavior in the IS work setting, and poses research questions about the predictors and outcomes of such behavior.

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