In organizations, in order to earn rewards or maintain job security, employees may perform citizenship behavior in order to comply with the requirements of the organization or their supervisors, which will become a mandatory behavior over time. Employees perceive compulsive citizenship behavior as a privileged behavior that they perform because of the pressure exerted by their organization. However, performing compulsive citizenship behaviors and creating a display of conformity consumes too many resources (e.g., time and effort), which leads to increased negative emotions. in employees and as a result leads to emotional burnout.
The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of mandatory citizenship behavior on the adaptation aspect with the mediating role of emotional exhaustion. According to the purpose, the present research is of the type of applied research, and in terms of the method of collecting information, it is of the type of descriptive research and the correlation designs are of the type of structural equation model. Also, the current research is cross-sectional in terms of time. The statistical population of this research included all employees of sports and youth departments in Tehran in 1402 (N=250). Also, available sampling method was used to select the sample, and 130 people were selected as a sample. In this research, to measure compulsory citizenship behavior from the 5-question questionnaire of Gadot (2007), to measure the conformity view from the 6-question questionnaire of Hugh Lin, (2009) and to measure emotional exhaustion from the 8-question questionnaire of Moslesh and Jackson (1981). used. The validity of the questionnaires was confirmed by 5 experts, and Cronbach's alpha was used to check the reliability of the questionnaires, and the results showed that all the questionnaires had the necessary reliability. Data analysis was done in two parts, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, using SPSS and PLS software. The findings showed that mandatory citizenship behavior has a positive and significant effect on employees' compliance both directly (0.29) and through the mediator variable of emotional exhaustion (0.28). Also, mandatory citizenship behavior has a positive and significant effect on the emotional exhaustion (0.37) of sports department employees; Therefore, by clarifying the importance of mandatory citizenship behavior on increasing the level of adaptation and emotional exhaustion of employees, it can be stated that the probability of negative emotional reactions caused by mandatory citizenship behavior was higher among employees.
However, this accumulation of negative emotions may lead to emotional exhaustion; Therefore, to reduce the negative impact of emotional burnout on employees, management should provide appropriate rewards that compensate the resources consumed by employees when more effort is required to increase organizational performance.