Prosocial Behaviours at Work: Key Concepts, Measures, Interventions, Antecedents, and Outcomes

Dear Colleagues,

Prosocial behaviour is a broad category of voluntary behaviours or actions that are intended to benefit others and are valued by society (Eisenberg & Spinrad, 2014). In a work context, prosocial behaviours are often performed by a person or group and can be directed to an individual, group, organisation, community, or higher social goal. For example, political, social, or environmental activism can be considered as types of prosocial behaviour if they are directed towards the benefit of society and have positive consequences.

As an umbrella term, prosocial organisational behaviour encompasses numerous concepts, including citizenship behaviour, civility, respect, care, support, altruism, kindness, benevolence, giving, generosity, volunteering, and philanthropy, to name a few. It is also often associated with empathy, sympathy, perspective taking, humanity and compassion, collaboration, and cooperation and with personality traits such as agreeableness, prosocial personality, social value orientation, and even heroism.

One of the key critiques on the concept of prosocial behaviour is the lack of conceptual clarity (Gilbert et al. 2019; Toumbourou, 2016). For example, in some papers, prosocial organisational behaviour and organisational citizenship behaviour are referred to as synonymous terms, and in others they are seen as distinct concepts (Zettler, 2022; Reizer et al., 2020).

With these theoretical challenges in mind, this Special Issue focuses on prosocial organisational behaviour and its numerous related concepts. It invites several types of papers:

• Theoretical papers that can help clarify some of the current ambiguities and offer clearer distinctions between concepts.
• Reviews (narrative, systematic, meta-analyses, or others) that explore what impinges on prosocial behaviours at work, and the impact of prosocial organisational behaviours on givers, receivers, and others.
• New measures for concepts that fall under the umbrella of prosocial organisational behaviour
• Empirical papers on the antecedents of prosocial work behaviours.
• Empirical papers on the outcomes of prosocial behaviours at work for individuals and organisations.
• Reports on experimental research evaluating the impact of interventions that are either aimed towards promoting prosocial work behaviours or towards assessing the effects of prosocial work-based interventions on employees or the organisation. 

References:

Eisenberg, N., & Spinrad, T. L. (2014). Multidimensionality of prosocial behavior: Rethinking the conceptualization and development of prosocial behavior. In L. M. Padilla-Walker & G. Carlo (Eds.), Prosocial development: A multidimensional approach (pp. 17–39). Oxford University Press

Gilbert, P., Basran, J., MacArthur, M., & Kirby, J. N. (2019). Differences in the semantics of prosocial words: an exploration of compassion and kindness. Mindfulness, 10(11), 2259-2271.

Reizer, A., Galperin, B. L., & Koslowsky, M. (2020). Is Prosocial Behavior Always Good for the Workplace? On the Direction and Strength of the Relationship Between Prosocial Behaviors and Workplace Outcomes. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1886.

Toumbourou, J. W. (2016). Beneficial action within altruistic and prosocial behavior. Review of General Psychology, 20(3), 245-258.

Zettler, I. (2022). A glimpse into prosociality at work. Current opinion in psychology, 44, 140-145.

Dr. Rona Hart
Guest Editor

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• prosocial behavior
• prosocial organisational behaviour
• prosocial personality
• organisational citizenship behaviour