An Assessment of Positive Organizational Behavior in Service Sector of Pakistan: Role of Organization Based Self-Esteem and Global Self-Esteem

This study is an attempt to investigate prevalence of positive organizational behavior in the organizations in the service sector of Pakistan. We tested effects of organization based self-esteem, role stressors (role conflict, role overload and role ambiguity), leader-member exchange and perceived organizational support on positive organizational behavior as well as mediation of organization-based-self-esteem in this regard. Moreover, moderation of global self-esteem was also estimated in relationship between organization based self-esteem and positive organizational behavior. Data from 250 respondents from three service sectors of Pakistan (bank, hotel and education) was collected through mail survey and using stratified random sampling technique. Data analysis on the usable 215 questionnaires was made by using hierarchical multiple regression. Significant direct and indirect results through mediation of organization based self-esteem were found only for leader-member exchange, perceived organizational support and role ambiguity. Nevertheless, global self-esteem was not found to moderate the relationship of organization base self-esteem and positive organizational behavior. Implications and future research recommendations are also given.


INTRODUCTION
Since its evolution, positive psychology has been emphasizing on the need to focus on the strengths of individuals for better performance results than pondering over weaknesses and ways to fix them (Seligman, 1999;Luthans, 2002a, b).Significance of incorporating positive psychology in organizational behavior studies to improve employees' performance through management and measurement of their strengths has been recognized lately (Luthans, 2002a, b;Luthans, 2003).Luthans and Youssef (2007) explained Self-efficacy, Hope, Optimism and Resiliency as four key psychological resource capacities that make the best fit for the inclusion criteria for Positive Organizational Behavior resulting in enhancement of the managing effectiveness and organizational performance.However, among these four constructs, self-efficacy is proven to have the most intense effect on incorporating Positive Organizational Behavior (Bandura, 1997) and performance (Stajkovic and Luthans, 1998) and meeting the Positive Organizational Behavior criteria essentially (Luthans, 2002a, b).Studies suggest that the several forces arising selfefficacy (Bandura, 1982) are similar to arising and affecting self-esteem as well (Franks and Marolla, 1976;Korman, 1970Korman, , 1971Korman, , 1976;;Brockner, 1988).
Studies from Luthans (2002a, b) also demonstrate the positive self-efficacy as a state; unlike the general self-efficacy-a trait that is steady over time; explaining its elasticity in conversion through training and development.In this regard self-efficacy is similar to the organization based self-esteem which is also a state and domain specific.Studies reveal that in the organizational framework, OBSE is considered to be a better tool for measuring organizational performance and behavior (Tharenou, 1979;Epstein, 1979;Pierce et al., 1989).OBSE has also been verified theoretically and empirically to have a positive relationship with the individual's behavior towards the organization.With the impact of role stressors, Perceived Organizational support and Leader member exchange Low OBSE has been found to produce more antagonistic behavior in the employees, thus aggravating their performances and hindering them to postulate a more positive organizational behavior (Ferris et al., 2009).Though, this deviant behavior is an expected response, but some individuals are also seen to behave positively towards organization even in the presence of low OBSE (Ferris et al., 2009).So the relationship of OBSE and POB does not seem to be that simple.There may be many other factors affecting this relationship.
The moderation approach to self-esteem explains it as an attitude of an individual to draw upon all the existing socio-emotional resources (Global self-esteem) to deal with low support that leads to low OBSE.Moreover, the plasticity hypothesis by Brockner (1983) explains that people with high self-esteem are less likely to be influenced by the incidents at workplace.Global self-esteem has been used as moderator to stress-strain relationship (Jex and Elacqua, 1999), stress-performance relationship (Mossholder et al., 1981(Mossholder et al., , 1982)), stress-health relationship (Kuiper and Olinger, 1989;Ganster and Schaubroeck, 1991).However, very little research has been done in determining the relationship of both general and domain specific dimensions of self-esteem with the positive organizational studies.Hence, taking the viability of employees' organization based self-esteem and global self-esteem in depicting their behaviors at workplace and dearth of knowledge about the effect of their relationship among employees from Pakistani organizations specifically, this study contends to focus on following objectives:

LITERATURE REVIEW
Positive organizational behavior is a more modern, promising and practical approach to focus on people's strengths and psychological capabilities.The concept actually started gaining acceptance after the proactive psychology movement when Seligman (1999), President American Psychological Association realized a dire need of shifting the long-established mindset of researchers to investigating the wrongs in the individual and organizational level to rights significantly.Later on work by Luthans (2002a, b;2003) emphasized more on this aspect of organization behavior.Positive organizational behavior is defined as "the study and application of positively oriented human resource strengths and psychological capacities that can be measured, developed and effectively managed for performance improvement in today's workplace" (Luthans, 2003).Wright (2003) shed light on emphasizing more on seeking for issues of employee happiness, health and betterment than just for their functional-based aspect.According to this concept, all the issues focused to employee betterment (social and Psychological) ultimately ends in to productive organizational behaviors and performances (Brockner, 1988;Pierce et al., 1989;Kuiper and Olinger, 1989;Pierce et al., 1993;Tafarodi and Swann, 1995;Carson et al., 1997;Jex and Elacqua, 1999;Pierce and Gardner, 2004 ;).
The construct of Positive Organizational behavior is based on four pillars of self-efficacy, hope, optimism and resilience.Empirical studies from Stajkovic and Luthans meta-analysis (1998) showed 28% increase in workplace performance due to self-efficacy, thus supporting the importance of this particular construct of positive organizational behavior.Studies from Luthans (2002a, b) also demonstrates the positive self-efficacy as a state; unlike the general self-efficacy-a trait, that is steady over time; explaining its elasticity in conversion through training and development.In this regard selfefficacy is similar to the organization based self-esteem which is also a state and domain specific.Positive Selfefficacy describes the perception of an employee for his/her level of competence across a variety of tasks (Bandura, 1982).Rosenberg (1979) also provided the self-esteem scale with self-confidence (self-efficacy) and self-deprecation as two main components.
Self-esteem has been conceptualized to have different levels of specificity that makes it a trait-global self-esteem and a state-Task or Domain specific selfesteem (Simpson and Boyle, 1975).A more versatile construct of self-esteem is given by different scholars focusing on its social, physical, academic, vocational and moral dimensions (Korman, 1966;Korman, 1970;Shavelson et al., 1976, Pierce andGardner, 2004).
Specifying the concept of self-esteem to its domain specificity Pierce et al. (1989) introduced the Organization Based Self Esteem (OBSE).It is defined as the degree to which an individual believes him/herself to be competent, considerable and valuable as an organization member (Pierce and Gardner, 2004).From literature it has been proven that OBSE is positively related to performance and behavior towards an organization.Individuals signifying high OBSE tend to be less passive in their behavior, more healthful and positive contributor to the organization than their low OBSE counterparts (Hall, 1972;Brockner, 1988;Campbell, 1990;Kinicki and Latack, 1990;Pierce et al., 1993;Jex and Elacqua, 1999).Having ample support from the literature for its powerful impact on behavior and performance it is proposed that: H1: OBSE has a positive relation with positive organizational behavior Baumiester (1999) and Brookover et al. (1964) found roots of self-esteem from interpersonal relationships and organizational culture in terms of supportiveness, trusting relationships and leadermember relationship.The most effective determinants of Individual's self-esteem at workplace i.e., OBSE, are found to be role stressors (role conflict, role ambiguity and role overload), Leader-Member exchange (LMX) and positive organizational Support (POS) (Hall, 1972;Mossholder et al., 1981Mossholder et al., , 1982;;Kuiper and Olinger, 1989;Ganster and Schaubroeck, 1991;Pierce et al., 1993;Jex and Elacqua, 1999;Crocker and Park, 2004;Williams, 2007).
Job related role stressors are proven to have immensely related to job performance and organizational behavior.The three most known and effective job stressors are Role conflict, Role Ambiguity and Role Overload (Hall, 1972;Jackson and Schuler, 1985;Bacharach et al., 1990;King and King, 1990;Jex and Beehr, 1991;Hecht, 2001;Koustelios et al., 2004;Pearson, 2008).
According to Baron (1986), Role Conflict (RC) occurs when task given/expected to be done to an individual by his family or organizational members is in incongruity to his/her abilities.The organizational stress literature demonstrates the significant effect of role conflict on performance and behavior (Hall, 1972;Jackson and Schuler, 1985;Jex and Beehr, 1991;King and King, 1990;Koustelios et al., 2004).It is defined as the employees' improbability about his job to be performed and its behavioral expectations (Baron, 1986).Along with role conflict, Role Ambiguity (RA) has also been noticed to influence the employee behavior (Ram et al., 2011) and OBSE strongly (Mossholder et al., 1981(Mossholder et al., , 1982;;Jex and Beehr, 1991;Koustelios et al., 2004;Shahbaz and Shakeel, 2013).
Role Overload (RO) is defined as the stress on an individual when he/she has to perform tons of tasks in accordance to meet the anticipated criteria in inadequate time period (Coverman, 1989;Pearlin 1989;Hecht, 2001).This job stressor is also noticed to have considerable influence on the employee's conduct towards an organization (Bacharach et al., 1990;Hecht, 2001;Pearson, 2008) Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) is a dyadic relationship referring to the quality of the interpersonal relationship of a leader and his/her followers (Gerstner and Day, 1997).LMX theory is different from theory of leadership in terms of focusing more on the interpersonal relationship of leader and member than just concentrating on the personality of the leader (Graen and Uhl-Bien, 1995;Ferris et al., 2009).LMX has been proven to have a considerable effect on individual's "in-group" performance and behavior towards organization as a whole (Graen and Uhl-Bien, 1995;Davis and Gardner, 2004;Cropanzano and Mitchell, 2005).Support is considered to be an important issue to perform better within the organization.Perceived Organizational Support (POS) is defined as the employee's conviction regarding the degree to which an organization and its members rate the employee's well-being (Eisenberger et al., 1986;Ferris et al., 2009).POS is strongly linked with the respect for organization (Rhoades and Eisenberger, 2002;Davis and Gardner, 2004).Lack of support results in lowering individuals' moral in terms of his/identity, integrity and competency (Aquino and Douglas, 2003;Ferris et al., 2009).Organizational based self-esteem has numerously been taken for building up relation between employees' performance and factors affecting it.Most of the times it is taken as a moderator to relationships between stress-strain (Jex and Elacqua, 1999), Stressperformance (Mossholder et al., 1981(Mossholder et al., , 1982)), Stresshealth (Kuiper and Olinger, 1989;Ganster and Schaubroeck, 1991) and as mediator to the relationship between Organization support and Organization Deviance (Ferris et al., 2009).Ferris et al. (2009) in their studies on determining the effects of organizational based self-esteem on organizational deviance found that the factors of LMX and POS had a negative relation with passive organizational behavior mediated by OBSE (Ferris et al., 2009).As LMX and POS are significantly related to positive organizational outcomes generally and in support of the studies by Ferris et al. (2009)  From the literature, various perspectives of Global self-esteem and OBSE are found to be affecting the prevalence of positive organizational behavior (Ferris et al., 2009).Though most of the research is done on identifying the weaknesses of the individuals in organizational context and fixing them up, the concept of focusing more on their strengths to improve and enhance their effectiveness, efficiency and healthiness is up-and-coming profoundly (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000;Luthans, 2002aLuthans, , b, 2003;;Luthans and Youssef, 2007).Both constructs of selfesteem are measured to view their shared and individual effect on the performance behavior and outcomes (Brockner, 1988;Pierce et al., 1989;Kuiper and Olinger, 1989;Pierce et al., 1993;Tafarodi and Swann, 1995;Carson et al., 1997;Jex and Elacqua, 1999;Pierce and Gardner, 2004).Organizational Based Self-Esteem and global self-esteem have also been proven by Jex and Elacqua (1999) to mediate each other's effects on the performance.
Though both OBSE and Global self-esteem are found to have an impact on behavioral outcomes of individuals, yet, we see that both cannot serve as replacement for one another (Marsh, 1986) and controlling the effects of global self esteem wipes out the effects of OBSE (Jex and Elacqua, 1999).Regardless of the fact that global self-esteem is proven to be a strong moderator to performance relationships for its trait and more stable nature, there is hardly any theoretical or empirical evidence of its moderating relationship to Positive organizational behavior and OBSE.Global self-esteem is referred to as individual's positive or negative attitude towards his/herself (Rosenberg et al., 1995) and the extent and nature of one's self-views regarding degree of importance and certainty (Pelham and Swann, 1989).Though, after the emergence of OBSE concept most of the organizational behavior and performance based research is focused on OBSE, yet the importance of global self-esteem as a moderator to this relationship cannot be ignored (Jex and Elacqua, 1999).Literature supports global selfesteem as a strong moderator to stress-performance relationships (Hall, 1972;Kinicki and Latack, 1990;Rosenberg et al., 1995;Jex and Elacqua, 1999).We also see from research by Jex and Elacqua (1999) that both OBSE and Global self esteem mediate each others' effect on organizational behavior and performance.According to self-enhancement theory, both low and high self-esteem individuals have basic need to augment their level of self-esteem (Dipboye, 1977;Sedikides et al., 2003;Pierce and Gardner, 2004;Ferris et al., 2009).This illustrates that though individuals with low OBSE tend to behave passively, some may execute positive behavior towards their organization too (Fig. 1).
H5: Global Self-Esteem (GSE) moderates the relation between OBSE and positive organizational behavior.

METHODOLOGY
Procedure: The Stratified Random Sampling was used to collect data from the organizations in three different service sectors of Lahore city i.e., Banks, Education and Hotel.The target sample for this study was 250 respondents.The questionnaire was developed using validated scales of the variables involved in the model.The data was collected by using mail survey method and follow-up visits.From 250 respondents (employees) in the organizations under study, 35 questionnaires were discarded due to improper and incomplete answers to the questions, making 86% response rate.Finally the analysis was made by linear regression for the data of 215 respondents using SPSS 17.0.
Participants: Among the 215 respondents, 100 respondents from Banking Sector consisting of 12 respondents from Top management, 42 from Middle management and 46 from lower management.Got 75 respondents from Hotel Industry with 25 respondents each from 3 levels of managerial hierarchy.From Education sector we got 40 respondents where 9 were from Top management, 11 from middle management and 20 from Lower management.

Measures:
The survey instrument consisted of two sections.Section A was designed to get information about the demographic profile of the respondents regarding their age, education, experience and gender and management level.Section B comprised of total 59 items related to all variables under study, to obtain descriptive data from the respondents.All ratings were made using validated scales and on 5-Likert's Scale (1 = Strongly Disagree and 5 = Strongly Agree) except for Leader-Member Exchange where 5-Likert's Scale rated from (1 = Rarely and 5 = Very Often).The reliability of data was checked through Cronbach's Alpha reliability test (α.831).
Independent variables: OBSE: 10-item scale by Pierce et al. (1989) was used.For role conflict, 5-item scale by Rizzo et al. (1970) was used.For role ambiguity, 4-item scale by Rizzo et al. (1970) was used.For role overload , 3-item scale by Bacharach et al. (1990) was used.For LMX, 5-item scale by Graen

DISCUSSION
Literature highlights gap of research carried out on the assessing positive psychology at workplace in developing countries like Pakistan (Ismail et al., 2011).Most of the earlier studies in assessing employees' behaviors are made to focus on fixing up the weaknesses and problems related to employees and their behavior towards organization (Seligman, 1999;Luthans, 2002aLuthans, , 2002bLuthans, , 2003)).
This particular study especially meant for introducing POB in Pakistani organizations, is a step forward in all efforts made to divert the attention of researchers to more positive aspects of employee s' behaviors, traits and their strengths in order to enhance positive organizational behavior (Brockner, 1988;Pierce et al., 1989;Kuiper and Olinger, 1989;Pierce et al., 1993;Tafarodi and Swann, 1995;Carson et al., 1997;Jex and Elacqua, 1999;Pierce and Gardner, 2004).For this purpose we measured the effects of the most powerful predictor for self-esteem in the organizational domain on reflecting positive organizational behavior.Moreover, in the light of distant literature on determinants of organizational based self-esteem, we used Role Conflict, Role Ambiguity, Role Overload, LMX and POS to assess their influence on OBSE and POB.Our hypothesis regarding these variables showed that OBSE, LMX and POS were positively related to Positive organizational behavior hence supporting the earlier studies made on influence of these predictors on employees' organizational behaviors (Ferris et al., 2009;Ismail et al., 2011).However, only one role stressor (role ambiguity) was found to be related to positive organizational behavior of the employees showing that in Pakistani organizations generally employees' behaviors are significantly affected by unclear job roles role (Ram et al., 2011) which also effects their selfesteem at work place (Shahbaz and Shakeel, 2013).
Employees' depiction of elevated organizational performance and behavior even in the presence of unfavorable conditions like low OBSE , LMX and POS (Ferris et al., 2009) the role of global self-esteem was ensued and evaluated as a moderator.Our results however did not show any significant results for moderating effects of global self-esteem in relationship between OBSE and POB.This was inconsistent to what we predicted, however, showed congruence with argument of previous study that the moderation and buffering effects of self-esteem in relationship of role stressors and organizational performance is not straightforward.It is often affected by self-esteem contingencies' like importance that an individual give to performance level when his/her self-esteem is low (Ferris et al., 2010).

STRENGTHS AND LIMITATION
The present study has a number of strengths.First of all this is the novel attempt made to empirically test the relationship between OBSE of employees and their Positive Organizational Behavior.Moreover, we have included the maximum number of the variables (LMX, POS, Role Stressors) that could have strong effect on POB as the variables chosen were the most effective variables for determining OBSE (Jackson and Schuler, 1985;Jex and Beehr, 1991;King and King, 1990;Hall, 1972;Koustelios et al., 2004;Bedeian and Armenakis, 1981;Bacharach et al., 1990;Hecht, 2001;Pearson, 2008;Graen and Uhl-Bien, 1995;Ferris et al., 2009;Davis and Gardner, 2004;Cropanzano and Mitchell, 2005;Rhoades and Eisenberger, 2002;Davis and Gardner, 2004).
We used validated scales for the development of our questionnaire to avoid any discrepancies and false results for our data collected.Moreover, the data was collected from three different service sectors, Banking, Hotel and Education.This gave us a more detailed result for service sectors of Pakistan.
This study has some limitations as well.The organizations selected for the study was from the Lahore city only which limits the generalization of our results to whole population of Pakistan.Moreover, to test the more valid and actual result of effect of OBSE on POB the effect of LMX, POS and Role Stressors should have been controlled as they also had a proven effect on OBSE which can influence the direct effects.

FUTURE RESEARCH SUGGESTIONS
Our study is an attempt to provide a foothold for future research on the most up and coming theory of positive psychology in organizational behavior.Future research can focus on investigating main and interactive effects of self-esteem contingencies related to traits of employees.In this respect, employees' self-defeating behavior (Renn et al., 2005;Thau et al., 2007) and selfefficacy (Azar and Vasudeva, 2006;Lunenburg, 2011) can prove to be strong potential variables to self-esteem levels of employees at work place.Nevertheless, future studies can see the moderating effects of two distinct dimensions of global self-esteem-self-liking (based on social reflections) and self-competency (based on domain specificity)-as they both have distinct antecedents and effects (Tafarodi and Swann, 1995).

CONCLUSION
The present study provides evidence for positive relation of organization based-self-esteem with positive organizational behavior.It also signifies effects of leader-member exchange, positive organizational support and role ambiguity on OBSE and POB.To nurture positive organizational behavior among employees, organizations in Pakistan are suggested to foster their organization based self-esteem by providing supportive culture and clear job descriptions.

H2:
Role stressors (RC, RO and RA) are negatively related to Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) H3: LMX and POS are positively related to Positive Organizational Behavior (POB)

Table 3 :
Results for hierarchical multiple regression analysis