Self-reports of organisational citizenship behaviour: a researchers' dilemma

Choosing the right source to measure organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is a dilemma to researchers. We used narrative review and content analysis to draw meaningful conclusions to resolve this dilemma. Ninety-one very recent articles on OCB were used for the analysis. The primary focus of the narrative review was to examine if there are similarities in research results irrespective of whether self-reports, or other reports were used. The content analysis focused on the remedies used in these studies to handle self-report biases. While researchers expressed the use of self-reports as a limitation of their study, there was not much evidence to prove that self-report bias was strong enough to impact these research results negatively. Self-report measure and other reports are fairly similar. Hence, considering the uniqueness, self-reports are the best source for measuring OCB. Choosing the right measure to elicit data is an important methodological issue that improves the quality of survey research. Our article addresses this key issue.