Introduction: Perceived organizational support, leads to job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behaviors, thus can be used to manage nurses and improve their performance, and thus is useful for hospitals. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating the effect of perceived organizational support on organizational citizenship behaviors with emphasis on the mediating role of job satisfaction at Hazrat Mahdi hospital of Mashhad.

Methods: This study was performed on 146 nurses in the ICU of Hazrat Mahdi hospital in Mashhad city during year 2016. To gather the data, the Organ questionnaire (1990) for measuring organizational citizenship behavior and Chang questionnaire (2014) for measuring perceived organizational support and job satisfaction were used. Convergent validity of these tools was, respectively, 0.54, 0.54 and 0.53, and Cronbach's alpha coefficient of reliability, was, respectively, 0.87, 0.72 and 0.72). Data from the questionnaires using descriptive analysis (SPSS software), as well as variance-based structural equation modeling (Smart PLS software) were analyzed.

Results: The results showed that perceived organizational support had a significant effect on job satisfaction (β = 0.63 and T = 4.75) and job satisfaction had a significant effect on organizational citizenship behavior (β = 0.66, T = 2.23). Also perceived organizational support had a direct effect on organizational citizenship behavior (β = 0.15 and T = 2.56).

Conclusions: Results show that nursing managers need to make an infrastructure that is supportive of nurses so that this support could lead to job satisfaction and in this way organizational citizenship behaviors, which are optional, voluntary and meta functions can be achieved.