More than providing ‘solutions’: towards an understanding of customer-oriented citizenship behaviors of IS professionals

Information systems (IS) support in organizations has undergone dramatic 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, justification, personalization-technology and personalization-business. Our results also show different associations between four contextual factors of IS support (i.e. system, 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 categorization 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.