Does citizenship pressure enhance organizational citizenship behavior? The roles of paternalistic leadership and cognitive appraisal

Purpose – This study investigates how different dimensions of paternalistic leadership – authoritarian, moral and benevolent – affect organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) through the mediating role of citizenship pressure (CP). It further explores how employees’ cognitive appraisals of stress (challenge vs. threat) moderate these relationships. Design/methodology/approach – A moderated-mediation model was tested using survey data collected from 620 employees across various organizations. The analysis examined the conditional indirect effects of leadership styles on OCB via CP, under varying levels of cognitive appraisal. Findings – We found significant moderated-mediation effects for all three leadership styles. The conditional indirect effects indicate that when both challenge and threat appraisals are low, CP does not mediate the effects of either moral and benevolent or authoritarian leadership on OCB. However, for the three other appraisal combinations the association of moral and benevolent leadership with OCB was mediated through a decrease in CP, while the association between authoritarian leadership and OCB was mediated through an increase in CP. A practical recommendation for managers is to encourage employees to appraise pressure as a challenge rather than a threat. When pushing employees to engage in OCBs, managers should clearly communicate the benefits and opportunities associated with these behaviors. Practical implications – When pushing employees to engage in OCBs, managers should clearly communicate the benefits and opportunities associated with these behaviors. Originality/value – This study contributes to leadership and stress research by integrating the challenge–hindrance stressor framework into a dynamic model of leadership influence. Rather than treating cognitive appraisals as mutually exclusive, it adopts a “both/and” approach to better capture the complex ways in which employees experience and respond to workplace stressors. The findings highlight the importance of contextual and perceptual factors in understanding how leadership styles influence discretionary employee behaviors.