Employer Expectations and Strategies for IT Employees’ Citizenship Behaviours: A Thematic Analysis

Intersecting geographical and cultural contexts coalesce to inform theories about workplace behaviour and practices. Existing theories must be contextualized and customised, and new ones must be created, to better suit the complexities of other cultures and contexts. We aimed to conceptualize organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in the Indian Information Technology (IT) sector context, a major research gap in the current literature. Data from semi-structured interviews of 14 key informants, who were employers and senior managers in IT organizations in India, was subjected to thematic analysis. We inductively developed thematic models of expected OCBs and OCB-enhancing strategies from employers’ perspectives and drew insights from the analysis of narratives through an economically informed lens. In our findings, we present novel emic OCBs specific to the Indian context; explain themes in both models and their frequencies of occurrence with reference to culture, industry and economic environment; analyse context-specific perceptions of and barriers to OCBs; and provide insights and recommendations for research and practice. The models can be further refined, tailored to different industries, and used as bases for more accurate OCB evaluation.