10236: How Interpretation of War Events Impacts Work OCB: The Relevance of Social History & Relationships (session 25445)

We explore how an escalation of a war event can impact the behavior of individuals at their place of work: particularly with respect to personal organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Leveraging theory on how event novelty, criticality, and disruptiveness can change behavior, we build a model arguing both personal interpretation of events, and the positions of one's social relations, can influence behavior. We test our model in the context of the aftermath of Russia's attempted full-scale invasion of neighbor Ukraine in 2022, leveraging two distinct, but related samples: Ukrainian citizens living in the country, and individuals in North America of Ukrainian descent. We find broad support for several of our hypotheses, and discuss the important theory building implications of these findings.

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