Illegitimate Tasks, Negative Affectivity, and Organizational Citizenship Behavior among Private School Teachers: AMediated–Moderated Model

Abstract

Social sustainability has gained popularity over the last decade, with a growing body of research calling for researchers to focus on the personal-level determinants of employee satisfaction and well-being in the pursuit of social sustainability. By using negative affectivity as a mediating mechanism and gender and passive leadership as moderators, this study examines a novel sequential mediation–moderation model that explores the relationship between unreasonable tasks and teachers’ Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB). It employs the Conservation of Resources (COR) and Stress as Offense to Self (SOS) paradigms as acomprehensivetheoretical framework for organizational stressors and organizational behavior. A total of 415 matched questionnaire responses were collected Citation: Shaya, N.; Mohebi, L.; Pillai, R.; Abukhait, R. Illegitimate Tasks, Negative Affectivity, and Organizational Citizenship Behavior among Private School Teachers: A Mediated–Moderated Model. Sustainability 2024, 16, 733. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su16020733 Academic Editors: Sandro Serpa and Maria José Sá Received: 10 September 2023 Revised: 27 November 2023 Accepted: 29 November 2023 Published: 15 January 2024 Copyright: © 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). from private school teachers in the UAE. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is conducted using AMOS 20, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) is utilized to verify the causal and moderation hypotheses, and the resulting moderated mediated conceptual model is evaluated by employing Hayes PROCESS analysis. Results demonstrate the effects of illegitimate tasks on OCB are indirect and statistically significant and are mediated through negative affectivity. The cumulative effect of illegitimate tasks and negative affectivity on OCB is magnified by the moderating effects of passive leadership.