More than providing ‘solutions’: towards an
understanding of customer-oriented
citizenship behaviours of IS professionals
Xuefei (Nancy) Deng,* Tawei Wang
†
& Robert D. Galliers
‡,§
*Information Systems and Operations Management, College of Business Administration and
PublicPolicy, California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, CA, USA, email:
ndeng@csudh.edu,
†
School of Accountancy, Shilder College of Business, University of
Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA, email: twwang@hawaii.edu,
‡
Information and Process
Management and Sociology Departments, Bentley University, Waltham MA, USA, and
§
School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, email:
rgalliers@bentley.edu
Abstract. Information systems (IS) support in organizations has undergone dra-
matic changes over the years. IS professionals in the support function have become
an important knowledge source to colleagues who seek assistance with their IS
usage. Our understanding of IS professionals’ customer-oriented behaviours is
limited, however. Focusing on IS post-implementation support and drawing upon
organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) theory, this paper seeks to understand
IS professionals’ citizenship behaviours in supporting colleagues. Our analysis of
630 support tasks performed by IS professionals with regard to two systems at three
periods reveals five types of customer-oriented OCB: anticipation, education, justi-
fication, personalization-technology and personalization-business. Our results also
show different associations between four contextual factors of IS support (i.e. sys-
tem, user, task and problem) and the OCBs. In instances of user deficiency, more
personalization-business and anticipation OCBs were observed across all the four
problem domains (functionality, data, workflow and role). By contrast, in instances
of system deficiency, more personalization-technology OCBs were observed
among the two problem domains of data and functionality. Moreover, the occurrence
of OCBs revealed a temporal pattern such that personalization-business OCBs are
more pronounced in early post-implementation periods whereas anticipation OCBs
and personalization-technology OCBs become more dominant later. The categori-
zation scheme of the customer-oriented OCB, the OCB dynamics and the patterns
between OCB types and the contextual factors advance our understanding of the
evolving and challenging work of organizational IS support. Our findings extend
the OCB literature on customer orientation and enrich the limited studies on
knowledge-intensive IS support work. Practical implications of the findings on IS
management and policies are discussed.
doi: 10.1111/isj.12051
Info Systems J (2015)
© 2015 Wiley Publishing Ltd