Purpose: Studies have shown that status-based rankings exist within almost every human social group and influence most aspects of organizational life. However, few studies have discussed the relationship between employees’ status and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Based on social cognitive theory, this paper explores the relationship between employees’ status perception and two types of OCBs: challenging and affiliative, as well as the mechanism underlying this relationship by introducing work vitality as the mediator and dominance motivation as the moderator. Methods: We collected the empirical data from different enterprises located in major cities in China following a two-stage sampling procedure. The final sample consists of 330 employees. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypothesis. Results: Employee status perception is positively related to work vitality (b = 0.103, p = 0.027), challenging OCBs (b = 0.160, p < 0.001) and affiliative OCBs (b = 0.105, p = 0.006). Work vitality mediates the relationship between employee status perception and challenging OCBs with 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals [0.004, 0.063], and it also mediates the relationship between employee status perception and affiliative OCBs with 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals [0.004, 0.049]. The interaction of status perception and dominance motivation is significantly related to work vitality (b = 0.121, p = 0.041). Specifically, when dominance motivation is at low level, the effect of status perception on work vitality is − 0.008 (non-significant); when dominance motivation is high level, the effect is 0.175 (p = 0.005). Conclusion: The result suggests that employees’ perceptions of status are positively and significantly related to their challenging and affiliative OCBs, and employee’s work vitality mediates this relationship. It further indicates that dominance motivation moderates the relation between status perception and work vitality. Specifically, the positive relationship between employee status perception and work vitality is stronger when an employee has high dominance motivation than low dominance motivation.