How and When Does Negative Beneficiary Contact Relate to Service Behaviours? Unpacking the Roles of Prosocial Impact and Service-Oriented High-Performance Work Systems in Public Healthcare

Although public healthcare workers frequently encounter negative interactions with patients and care recipients, research on how such contact shapes staff behavior is limited. The purpose of the current study is to advance knowledge of how and under what conditions negative beneficiary contact is related to service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) in public healthcare organizations. Drawing on the relational job design perspective, this study examines prosocial impact as a mediator of the link between negative beneficiary contact and service-oriented OCBs, and the buffering role of service-oriented high-performance work systems (HPWS) on this mediated relationship. Two time-lagged, multisource datasets from nurses and their direct supervisors in hospitals in Romania (Study 1) and Egypt (Study 2) were used to test the proposed model. The results showed that prosocial impact mediates the relationship between negative beneficiary contact and service OCBs, but this indirect link was insignificant when perceptions of HPWS were high. Implications for public management theory and practice are discussed.