Status matters: The moderating role of perceived newcomer status in leader and coworker influences on challenging organizational citizenship behaviour

Organizations often fail to encourage employees, especially newcomers, to come forward with their suggestions and implement changes to improve the status quo, that is, to engage in challenging organizational citizenship behaviour (C-OCB). In order to be able to stimulate these behaviours from the outset and throughout a career a better understanding of contextual antecedents of C-OCB is needed. This study investigates how leaders and coworkers might facilitate C-OCB of employees (N = 266) with varying perceived newcomer status. Results revealed positive main effects of coworker variables (team-member exchange and coworkers’ C-OCB) but not of empowering leadership on C-OCB. Perceived newcomer status had a negative main effect on C-OCB and moderated the effects of both coworker variables: the positive effect of team-member exchange on C-OCB was stronger for those with higher compared to those with lower perceived newcomer status. Conversely, the positive effect of coworkers’ C-OCB on participants’ C-OCB was stronger for those with lower compared to those with higher perceived newcomer status. These findings provide evidence for the important role of coworkers in addition to leaders for understanding C-OCB.