Understanding Customer-Oriented Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Information System Support: An Exploratory Study

Organizations increasingly rely on information system (IS) professionals to facilitate end-users' effective use of information technologies. Focusing on IS post-adoptive support and drawing upon organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) theory, this study seeks to understand IS professionals' customer-oriented citizenship behavior, discretionary behavior that would greatly enhance customer service quality in IS support context. Analyzing 300 support service interactions at three points in time and with two applications, we identified five categories of customer-oriented citizenship behavior by IS support personnel, including anticipation, education, justification, personalization-technology and personalization-business. Moreover, different types of OCB were found dominant across three periods, starting with the justification OCB and gradually shifting to anticipation and education OCB. Results from this study demonstrate the value of customer-oriented citizenship behavior in IS context. Our findings contribute to the literature on IS post-adoptive use and provide organizations a useful guideline for enhancing IS service quality.