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Organizational environment where the organizational behavior takes place and the task roles employees need to perform have become increasingly complex in today's organizations. To respond to this complexity, modern organizations need willing, flexible, and proactive employees who go beyond narrow task requirements and who approach work proactively by showing personal initiative (Crant, 2000; Ohly, Sonnentag, & Pluntke, 2006; Parker, 2000; Sonnentag, 2003). In an era where the responsibility and decision making have shifted downward through transformational leadership and shared decision-making, employees have started taking part in both decision making and implementation process without constant close supervision (Frese & Fay, 2001; Sonnentag, 2003). They are expected to demonstrate discretionary behaviors that may go beyond their formally identified job descriptions to carry out the current expectations and comprehensive and complex tasks. Discretionary behavior refers to the employee behavior that is not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and in the aggregate promotes the efficient and effective functioning of the organization (Organ, Podsakoff, & MacKenzie, 2006; Van Dyne, Cummings, & McLean Parks, 1995). Employee discretionary behaviors contribute to maintenance and enhancement of the social and psychological organizational context which supports task performance and organizational effectiveness (McBain, 2004; Organ, 1997). As Den Hartog and Belschak (2007) stated, employee discretionary behaviors are crucial for organizations to be able to stay competitive in today's global economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediation effect of employee engagement on the relationship between employer obligations, employee obligations and state of the psychological contract and employee discretionary behaviours.

The empirical data were collected using self-administered questionnaires with 278 participants from 11 commissions and three agencies in the public service in Uganda. The authors used hierarchical regression analysis to investigate the hypotheses.

The results indicate that employer obligations, employee obligations and state of the psychological contract were positively related to employee discretionary behaviours. In addition, employee engagement was found to be a partial mediator between employee obligations, employer obligations and state of the psychological contract and discretionary behaviours among for both subordinate and supervisory staffs.

Since little is known about the process by which public service commissions and agencies in Uganda promote employer obligations, employee obligations and state of the psychological contract on discretionary behaviours, this paper contributes to the literature by examining human resource management practices in a developing country context.

Typical organizations comprise members whose behaviors range from the minimum possible to maintain membership, to those discretionarily engaging in job-related behaviors above that expected or required. These discretionary behaviors are beyond the job description and often are not recognized by the formal reward system. Possibly, individuals with high emotional intelligence are more prone to engage in discretionary behaviors. The relationship between the dimensions of emotional intelligence and discretionary citizenship behaviors has not previously been explored. Using samples of nursing and business university professors, this study investigates the relationship between discretionary behaviors of educators and the four branch model of emotional intelligence. Discretionary behaviors comprised a set of traditional organizational citizenship dimensions, and those behaviors beyond the expected unique to higher education. Salovey and Mayer's four branch model was used to assess emotional intelligence. Data were analyzed with correlation analysis and multiple regressions. The regression results indicate that managing emotion (the ability to manage one's emotions and emotional relationships) had the greatest number of significant positive relationships with discretionary behaviors in both samples. Perceiving emotions and understanding emotions produced negative relationships with sportsmanship in the nursing sample. The nursing sample produced more relationships between emotional intelligence and discretionary behaviors than the business faculty sample. Overall results support the idea that emotional intelligence is linked to discretionary citizenship behavior. The study results provide evidence to support the organizational value of emotional intelligence. Also, the results provide ideas for fruitful further research which may hold promise for increasing organizational effectiveness and efficiency.

The inherit complexity of an educational system further complicates the challenge of introducing technology-based educational initiatives into a school environment. Once introduced, the initiative has the potential to become self-sustaining or to cease once the term is over. Such uncertainty makes the use of expensive information technology (IT) in schools “risky business,” which requires school leaders go above and beyond their current routine to extend the system's capacity to sustain the innovation. A discretionary behavior of school leaders and teachers is one of key factors that contribute to or prevent the sustainability of an innovation. A lack of understanding of what encourages an individual's discretionary behavior and how discretion is fostered in school practices contribute to the challenge of innovation's sustainability. If the individuals’ discretion is required to sustain a technology-based educational program within a school, do their actions dwell outside or inside of the school environment? More importantly, how does a discretionary chain of command operate and can it be aligned? In this chapter we use an “ecological model” approach to describe the influential factors, which affect project's sustainability by transforming effective discretionary approaches of school leaders and teachers from policy to practice. We draw our description of the model on the results of the empirical study of Hong Kong schools involved in the design and strategic IT implementation of the e-Leadership Enhancement Project (eLEP).

There is strong and growing evidence of the importance of leadership and management factors influence on employee engagement and discretionary effort. However, the problem is that there has been limited recent effort to review where research gaps exit and provide a direction to guide future research. The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrated perspective on the influence of leadership and management factors on employee engagement and discretionary effort.

The review of the literature includes empirical research and case studies related to employee engagement and discretionary effort from various databases such as Business Premier, Cambridge University Press, JSTOR, Springer, Emerald, Wiley, ProQuest and ISI Web of Science. Supporting material was also accessed from reference books regarding similar concepts and theories.

The review provides a current view of the key topics, identifies three key research gaps, suggests a refined, up-to-date definition of both employee engagement and discretionary effort, and proposes a conceptual framework to inform future research. In doing so, it offers new directions for progressing studies on these critical workplace practices and behaviours particularly the inclusion of national culture as a moderating variable when investigating or implementing employee engagement and discretionary effort strategies.

Findings are based on existing literature and require empirical testing. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Undertaking a review of the literature is an important part of any research and this review aims to organise, describe and appraise the current literature with a view to gaining a critical perspective for the benefit of researchers.

This study examines the relationship between leader–member exchange (LMX) and employee discretionary work behaviors in terms of job crafting, innovative work behavior and knowledge-sharing behavior by focusing on the mediating role of psychological safety.

Multi-source and multi-wave data were collected from 284 employees in the banking sector of Pakistan.

The findings reveal a positive relationship between LMX and psychological safety. Psychological safety, in turn, is positively related to discretionary work behaviors (i.e. job crafting, innovative work behavior and knowledge-sharing behavior). Moreover, psychological safety fully mediates the relationship between LMX and discretionary work behaviors.

Drawing upon the conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study introduces psychological safety as a mediating mechanism in the relationship between LMX and three important discretionary work behaviors.

This study focuses on assistant principals, the “forgotten future workforce” of educational leadership. We explored the current landscape of assistant principalship within the context of work performance, including both task and discretionary performance, and the future career aspirations of assistant principals from a cross-national perspective. Specifically, the study aimed to fulfill the following objectives: (a) to identify the factors affecting the task and discretionary performance of assistant principals, (b) to identify the factors affecting three future career aspirations of assistant principals, and (c) to determine whether the influences of these factors differ by national origin. Personal initiative and perceived organizational support (POS) were the independent variables. This study also examined the demographic attributes of the participants and their schools. Two randomly selected samples, which composed of 227 Turkish and 144 American assistant principals were the participants. The data-gathering instrument incorporated the revised versions of the Personal Initiative Scale (Fay & Frese, 2001), the Perceived Organizational Support Scale (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986), and the School Organizational Citizenship Behavior Scale (DiPaola & Tschannen-Moran, 2001). The findings of the study showed that personal initiative and POS significantly predicted the task performance, discretionary performance, and certain future career aspirations of assistant principals. National origin appeared to be a significantly differentiating factor of the assistant principals' task performances, discretionary performances, and future career aspirations. We drew conclusions and provided suggestions for future research.

Banks in India are underperforming on customer-centric measures. The existing mechanisms used by Indian banks for evaluating their customer interface are efficiency measures which are limited in deciphering bank’s success in fulfilling customer needs. The purpose of this paper is to build a case for banks to evaluate their processes on the dimension of customer experience (CE).

The study performs in-depth review of literature to identify the factors of CE and uses confirmatory factor analysis to confirm these factors in Indian retail banking context. Post factor confirmation, it uses discriminant analysis to test the predictive strength of the CE factors for discretionary behaviors of customers.

CE factors are categorized as functional clues (convenience and credibility), humanic clues (employee competence and compassion) and mechanic clues (service context). The study finds that the functional clues are the most significant predictors of customers’ discretionary behaviors followed by humanic clues while the mechanic clues are only hygiene factors for customer behaviors.

The study highlights CE factors which could be developed into potential competitive advantages for banks. Banks can prioritize their investments in these factors for improved economic performance.

There is no clear definition of CE in the extant literature particularly, in the context of retail banking. A factor-level study of CE for discretionary behaviors of bank customers is an attempt to provide specific inputs to those banks which are looking forward to use CE as a means to win and retain customers in markets characterized by intense competition.

Behavioural outcomes of empowerment are not often studied comprehensively and in a specific manner in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to test a research model that specifies how two empowering conditions (empowering leadership and job autonomy) influence specific behavioural outcomes expected from empowered subordinates (discretionary-empowered behaviours and participation in decision making). A mediated model through psychological empowerment is hypothesised.

A cross-sectional questionnaire study relying on 141 dyads of subordinates-supervisors was conducted. Subordinates provided information on psychological empowerment and empowering leadership, while supervisors assessed job autonomy and behavioural outcomes.

Structural equation modelling analyses lent partial support to the hypothesised model. Psychological empowerment completely mediated the relationships between empowering leadership and behavioural outcomes. However, psychological empowerment was a partial mediator of the relationships between job autonomy and behavioural outcomes. A strong direct link was found between job autonomy and participation in decision making.

This study enables to extend the empowerment literature by showing how job design and leadership factors contribute to boost two types of specific empowered behaviours. The contribution is particularly original in the case of subordinates’ participation in decision making that is not often considered as a subordinate’s empowered behaviour.

The purpose of this study was to examine factors affecting teachers’ work performance (i.e., task performance and discretionary performance) and career aspirations (i.e., remaining a teacher, seeking promotion to a principalship, and career change). Applying an inclusive social-cognitive perspective, the study integrated the personal, organizational, and leadership domains to explain teachers’ task performance, discretionary performance, and career aspirations. The three domains, represented by the independent variables of self-efficacy, collective efficacy, perceived organizational support, and principal leadership styles, predicted teachers’ work performance and career aspirations. Participants included 897 public school teachers in a southern state in the United States. The data gathering instrument incorporated several previously validated scales on study constructs. The analyses indicated that teacher self-efficacy, collective efficacy, POS, and principal transformational leadership all significantly predicted the teachers’ task performance, discretionary performance, and career aspirations. Study findings suggest directions for future research on factors influencing teachers’ work performance and career aspirations.