BACKGROUND: Organizational citizenship behavior can improve work efficiency and employee participation. This study systematically evaluated the level of organizational citizenship behavior of clinical nurses and meta-analysis the factors that affect it in terms of personal characteristics. The conclusions provide valuable recommendations for nursing managers to focus on cultivating organizational citizenship behavior. METHODS: Adhering to the preferred reporting items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines, we searched PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Embase, ScienceDirect, Wiley Online Library, Scopus, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, SinoMed, Wanfang and VIP 11 databases from the inception of the databases until November 2023. Subsequently, 2 researchers independently screened the literature, extracted data, and evaluated the risk of bias in the included studies. Meta-analysis was performed using Stata 15.0 and RevMan 5.4 software. RESULTS: Twenty cross-sectional studies were included. The sample comprised 8657 nurses. The results of the meta-analysis showed that marital status, employment types, participation in mental health-related training, professional titles, and years of work experience affected nurses' organizational citizenship behavior were the influencing factors of nurses' organizational citizenship behavior (P <
.05). CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that the level of organizational citizenship behavior among nurses is relatively high, but it still needs to be maintained. This result suggests that nursing managers should pay more attention to cultivating nurses' organizational citizenship behavior to improve organizational efficiency and further improve the quality of high-quality nursing services.