Authentic leadership and extra role behaviour among public utility sector employees in Sri Lanka

All organizations greatly depend on employees, as a matter of necessity, to act proactively and perform in their jobs. Basically, three types of employee performance have been identified, namely in-role performance, extra role performance and counterproductive work behaviour. In order for organizations to survive, compete and sustain growth in an ever-changing turbulent business environment, the task-related in-role performance alone appears inadequate. Hence, discretionary or extra role behaviour plays a key role in organizations, contributing positive outcomes. The primary objective of this study was to examine the relationship between authentic leadership and organizational citizenship behaviour with the mediation impact of psychological capital and the moderation effect of the generational differences. The disproportionate stratified random sampling method was used in which samples were drawn from six public utility organizations in Sri Lanka. Data was collected from 396 samples of front line workers through self-administrated questionnaires. The Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS – SEM) was applied to test the hypotheses. The results of the study confirmed that authentic leadership (AL) and psychological capital (PsyCap) are significant predictors of organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) and organizational citizenship behaviour towards the environment (OCBE). More importantly, the results also confirmed the mediating effect of PsyCap on the relationship between AL and OCB as well as between AL and OCBE. It indicates that PsyCap is an underlying process which explains the spillover effect of AL on both types of OCB. However, there is no evidence of moderation effect of generational differences on the relationship between PsyCap and both types of OCB. The findings of this study stand as an extension to the existing organization behaviour literature by integrating the factors that could enhance the employee’s extra role performance. The findings also have some significant practical contributions to the public utilities sector in Sri Lanka in terms of policies and practices related to human resource management.