1. Introduction
A sustainability approach to management implies rethinking traditional insights through different lenses and emphasizes collaborative-based views, instead of the competition-based ones [
1]. It has become a prominent subject in research due to its major implications for both the employees and the organization in the current business scenario [
2,
3,
4,
5]. This concept implies guiding the company not only towards maximizing economic benefits, but also towards social welfare and environmental protection, reconciling economic, environmental, and social objectives [
6].
A new organizational sensitivity is required to manage, promote, and guarantee sustainable development in current organizations contextualized in turbulent and constantly changing environments [
1]. A managerial approach and new leadership styles that show awareness of the importance of relationships, cooperation, and building positive narratives in organizational contexts is the key to mobilizing energy, facing challenges, and promoting the sustainable development and well-being of people in organizations.
From this perspective, the company is visualized as a system of cooperative relationships in which stakeholders encourage the organization to behave in an ethically, environmentally, and socially responsible manner, and this interdependence enhances organizational sustainability and resilience [
7]. Corporate social responsibility strategies and initiatives together with the promotion of an organizational culture and values consistent with the sustainability model constitute the cornerstone of sustainable organizational development. Along with the sustainable approach, organizations should achieve performance through human resource management policies and practices that emphasize justice, development, well-being, and respect for the environment, through satisfied and committed employees [
8]. Thus, prosocial behaviors, commitment, and employee well-being are central dimensions of sustainable human resources management.
Researchers distinguish between explicit and implicit attitudes towards sustainable development [
9]. Unlike explicit assumptions and models regarding sustainability, the implicit cognitive dimension captures mental constructs such as attitudes that influence perception, judgment, and action, and that occur without individual awareness or conscious control [
10]. Prosocial organizational behaviors are conceived as implicit towards sustainability and comprise voluntary behaviors carried out by members of an organization during the performance of their functions, that are intended to provide benefits to the person, group, or organization to which they are addressed [
11,
12,
13]. They include acts such as helping, comforting, sharing, donating, cooperating, or volunteering [
14], as well as actions involving proactive assistance, responding to requests for assistance, or defending the organization [
15]. The study of prosocial behavior in organizations has garnered increasing relevance in the field of organizational behavior due to its valuable contribution to personal and organizational development [
16]. It has been shown that these extra-role behaviors improve reciprocity, cooperation, and solidarity in interpersonal social relationships [
17], favor employees’ well-being [
15,
16,
17,
18] and contribute to the growth and sustainable advantage of the organization [
19,
20,
21].
Among the wide variety of forms of prosocial behaviors, much of the research has focused on the study of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), which have been considered the prototypical prosocial actions [
15,
16]. OCBs are defined as discretionary behaviors that exceed job requirements [
22,
23,
24] and are not directly rewarded by the organization but nonetheless promote its effectiveness [
25,
26,
27]. Organizational citizenship behavior has been conceptualized as a multidimensional construct that includes job behaviors that benefit co-workers, as well as the organization [
28].
There have been various proposals on how to assess this type of behavior [
29]. However, most of the research has operationalized the construct using the original five categories or a subset of them [
25,
27]: altruism (i.e., voluntarily helping or assisting other employees with their job or with other tasks), courtesy (i.e., being polite and considerate of others to avoid conflict), civic virtue (i.e., representing well and supporting the organization), conscientiousness (i.e., planning ahead to avoid co-workers and oneself feeling overwhelmed with work), and sportsmanship (i.e., not complaining about work or workloads). Subsequently, other taxonomies have been proposed [
30], but most of them are highly correlated and overlap with each other [
31,
32]. For this reason, various researchers have suggested differentiating two dimensions of OCB according to their objective [
23,
28,
33]: individual OCB and organizational OCB. Individual OCB refers to job-related behaviors that benefit co-workers. Altruism fits into this category, as it refers to discretionary behaviors aimed at helping a specific other person with a relevant problem or task [
25]. Organizational OCB encompasses those behaviors that benefit the organization in general [
34]. Among them, civic virtue, refers to the behaviors that entail getting involved in the governance of the organization, responsibly participating, and looking out for its best interests even at high personal cost [
35]. This type of civic behavior contributes to achieving sustainable competitive advantage [
19,
36].
Previous research has pointed out that perceived organizational support (POS) can exert motivational effects that drive prosocial behaviors [
35]. Organizational support theory (OST) allows integrating the literature on POS [
28], which has been conceptualized as the degree to which individuals perceive that the organization cares about their well-being and overall work satisfaction and values their contributions [
28]. The perception of feeling supported and valued by the organization and identified with it, connects with additional role behaviors of a prosocial nature [
37,
38]. Nevertheless, negative effects such as work pressure, fatigue, or loss of effectiveness can occur when employees show prosocial behavior without adequate organizational support [
39,
40]. Some components of organizational commitment understood as the psychological link between an employee and the organization [
41], also indicate inclination towards prosocial behavior [
11,
30]. Among these components, affective commitment (AC) is characterized by a strong belief in and acceptance of objectives and values, and a strong desire to belong to the organization [
42,
43]. The mediation of POS-related outcomes, such as affective engagement, contributes to creating POS associations with various outcomes such as better extra-role performance [
44].
The existing literature has already noted that perceived organizational support enhances affective commitment [
44,
45] and that employees’ emotional attachment towards the organization exerts a mediating role in the interplay between perceived organizational support and knowledge sharing behavior (KSB). KSB involves providing information and know-how, and collaborating with others to facilitate problem-solving, creativity, innovation, or change [
46,
47]. It implies an exchange process that depicts the individuals’ action of transferring their knowledge (knowledge donating) and getting others to share it (knowledge collecting) [
48]. It requires an effort on the part of the person who shares it and contains an element of reciprocity [
49,
50]. KSB has also been identified a key prosocial behavior [
15,
51,
52]. However, it may not necessarily be spontaneous; it can be driven by managers and be recognized by the organizational reward system [
14,
53]. That type of leadership can inspire knowledge sharing through empowering employees and providing resources [
54] so that if employees perceive organizational support, they are more committed [
44,
45] and willing to participate in knowledge sharing [
53].
The purpose of this research is to link perceived organizational support, affective commitment, and knowledge sharing behavior with prosocial and unrewarding extra-role organizational behaviors such as altruism and civic virtue, that are spontaneously and voluntarily performed. The mediating role of knowledge exchanges and their combined effects has been infrequently considered. In addition, the literature has analyzed OCB as a joint construct, and specific research on its different dimensions is also scarce [
55,
56]. The choice of altruism and civic virtue is rooted in previous evidence that has already suggested that the antecedents of prosocial behaviors aimed at the benefit of specific individuals (altruism) or the entire organization (civic virtue) are distinct or have a different magnitude and direction [
57].
Hence, based on OST which emphasizes social exchange, attribution, and self-enhancement, we raise the following research question: Does the perception of organizational support influence the adoption of prosocial behaviors of altruism and civic virtue through affective commitment and knowledge sharing behavior? The identification of these predictors will allow us to present a scenario of the factors that drive unrewarding extra-role behaviors of individual or organizational citizenship.
The reminder of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we will explain the model and develop the specific hypotheses. Next, we will describe the sample and the method. Subsequently, we will present the results of the empirical analysis carried out. Finally, we will elaborate a discussion on the possible research and managerial implications of the results obtained.