Willingness and capacity: the determinants of prosocial organizational behaviour among nurses in the UK

Employees' prosocial organizational behaviour (PSOB), such as 'helping' and 'service quality' behaviour, is widely recognized as an important contributor to organizational success, particularly in service industry. Empirical studies in this area have been mainly conducted in the US context with samples of non-professional service workers. In this paper, PSOB among UK National Health Service nurses was empirically examined. Based on the general motivation and performance literature in psychology, nurses' PSOB performance was theoretically hypothesized to be a function of both their 'willingness' and their 'capacity' for PSOB performance. The 'willingness' component is captured by nurses' 'commitment' to their workplace and to their occupation, while the 'capacity' factor is tapped by nurses' sense of 'self-efficacy'. The empirical results of this study indicate that the level of PSOB is significantly explained by both commitment and self-efficacy and the contributions of self-efficacy and commitment to PSOB were independent and incremental. However, of the two forms of commitment, it was nurses' organizational rather than their occupational commitment which proved to be important. The theoretical contributions of the study and its implications for HRM practices are discussed.