Deducting the Organizational Citizenship Behavior Dimensions and its Antecedent ( Job Satisfaction ) in the Indian Context

In spite of the rapid growth of research in Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCB) in the recent past, there exists a considerable confusion in the concepts regarding the construction of OCB dimensions. It has also been accepted by researchers that OCB as a phenomenon is subjective to the national culture. Substantial organization studies have been directed towards comprehending and appreciating OCB as a dependent variable. The researchers hypothesized that Job Satisfaction (JS) would be strongly related to OCB. Hence the two primary objective of this study was to explore the conceptual dimensions of the OCB construct in the Indian context and secondly to investigate on JS as an antecedent of OCB. The cognitive measure of JS adopted in this study was confirmed to be positively correlated with the four dimensions of OCB namely, altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness and civic virtue. The extrinsic factors of JS were more strongly correlated to OCB than the intrinsic factors.


INTRODUCTION
Understanding the mechanism of Organization Citizenship Behavior (OCB) is crucial in the work place as organizations downsize and right-size in response to the economic pressures.OCB has been identified as a significant indicator of employees' performance that goes beyond formal duties and has a major positive impact on organizational outcomes including service quality and long-range sustainability (MacKensie et al., 1993;Podsakoff et al., 1997), performance and competitive advantage (Nemeth and Staw, 1989), service quality (Bettencourt and Brown, 1997), Organizational Commitment (Podsakoff et al., 1996) and Job Involvement (Dimitrades, 2007).Since OCB is a discretionary employee role that extends beyond the obligatory performance indicators required by an organization's formal job description, supporting the welfare of co-workers, work groups and the organization, employees with such behaviors are aspired for by organizations.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Organization citizenship behavior: The concept of OCB was introduced by Bateman and Organ in 1980s and latter researched for a broader comprehension in a number of studies.Organ (1988) described OCB as "a discretionary behavior, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system but in the aggregate promotes the performance of the organization" (Organ et al., 2006;Podsakoff et al., 2000).
Research on OCB which had extensively grown in the U.S. context has in the recent years been developing in other cultural contexts (Organ et al., 2006).Most OCB researchers Motowidlo (2000), Paine and Organ (2000), Podsakoff et al. (2000) and Turnipseed and Murkison (2000) believe that forms of organizational citizenship may be affected by national context and culture and investigating this socially-based citizenship behavior, would become parochial and incomplete if a national-wise verification of the phenomenon is not extended.Measurement of OCB, for instance, has shown certain differences and similarities in the U.S. and French contexts.Pascal (2009) OCB studies have been conducted in the Arab countries (Shaw et al., 2003), Belgium (Lievens and Anseel, 2004), China (Hui et al., 2004), Germany (Thau et al., 2004), Israel (Cohen, 2006) and Malaysia (Coyne and Ong, 2007) to obtain manifestations of the phenomenon in the ethnic context.
In contrast with the claim by Organ (1988) and others George and Brief (1992), Kidwell et al. (1997), Podsakof et al. (1997), Koys (2001), Tepper et al. (2004) and Pearce and Herbik (2004) that the aggregate level of OCB measured at the system, group or organizational level affects organizational effectiveness, Schnake and Dumler (2003) observed that OCB has generally been considered a type of individual discretionary behavior or performance.Organ (1988) recognized five distinctive dimensions of OCB-Altruism (helping others); civic virtue (keeping up with matters important in the organization); conscientiousness (compliance with norms); courtesy (consulting others before taking action); and sportsmanship (not complaining about trivial matters).Later, the OCB dimensions got consolidated into three parts: helping, courtesy and conscientiousness (Organ, 1997) and into two typesbehaviors directed at specific individuals in the organization, such as courtesy and altruism (OCBI); and behaviors concerned with benefiting the organization as a whole, such as conscientiousness, sportsmanship and civic virtue (OCBO) (Williams and Anderson, 1991).
To consolidate, two classification of the OCB construct can be concluded based on the dimensions that originate in a Western social cultural context: Seven dimensions of OCB-Helping Behavior, Sportsmanship, Organizational Loyalty, Organizational Compliance, Individual Initiative, Civic Virtue and Self Development (Podsakoff et al., 2000) and nine dimensions of OCB-Altruism, Conscientiousness, Sportsmanship, Courtesy, Civic Virtue, Functional Participation, Advocacy Participation, Loyalty and Voice (Katz, 1964;Farh et al., 2004).The German edition of the Organizational Citizenship Behavior construct deals with a general altruism orientation (Bierhoff et al., 2000); the Taiwan edition with, Identification with Company and Altruism toward Colleagues (Farh et al., 1997a); the Chinese edition with the 'taking Initiative, helping coworkers, voice, participation in group activities and promoting company image' (Farh et al., 2004).Thus the empirical findings conversely in the non-U.S.context, supported in addition to Altruism, only the dimensions of Consciousness and Civic Virtue (Farh et al., 1997b;Hui et al., 1999;Menguc, 2000;Doverspike et al., 2001;Chen and Francesco, 2003;Yoon and Suh, 2003;Farh et al., 2004).Farh et al. (1997a) established that there were two other ethnic dimensions that emerged to be specific to the Taiwanese culture-Interpersonal Harmony and Protecting Company Resources.In another study in the Chinese context, Farh et al. (2004) discovered the dimension of Social welfare participation that was not evident in the western literature.
These country-specific citizenship behaviors were the outcomes of the various economic, political and social backgrounds of the regions.Farh et al. (2004) and Turnipseed and Murkison (2000) attributed the different stages of economic development/environment, whereas the Romanian's perception of the need to fully take part in the organization to achieve job security in their period of rising unemployment was pointed out by Murkison (2000).The influence of increase in downsizing and cost cutting among the U.S. workers had influenced them to engage in organization directed OCB (Turnipseed and Murkison, 2000).In Romania the weak identification of the Romanian workers with their managers and the organization lead to loyalty scores, this was an obvious outcome of the Communists regime in the country (Lam et al., 1999).
Research findings support the notion that degrees of power distance and uncertainty avoidance cause variant forms of OCBs.Chhokar et al. (2001), for example in his study with five countries-America, England, France, India and Russia, adopted the perspectives of uncertainty avoidance and power distance to examine the relationship between culture and equity sensitivity.They hypothesized that more benevolent orientation would lead to more OCB and in low uncertainty avoidance cultures, socialization may lead individuals toward staying with and being more committed to an employer and subsequently toward higher levels of benevolence.High power distance culture, on the other hand, will lead employees to accept the organization's rights per se, resulting in obedience which, then will result in benevolence.In terms of differences across cultures upon individuals' perceptions and exhibition of benevolence, the results showed that Indians, Americans and Russians scored high on benevolence and the British as well as the French samples scored the lowest.Among the five country groups, Indians (low uncertainty avoidance, high power distance) were most oriented toward benevolence.
The literature reviewed indicates the significance for a confirmation of OCB dimensions in the Indian context.The OCB framework derived from Organ's (1988) work has received the most research attention (Hoffman et al., 2007).Hence this study focused exclusively on this form and measures OCB in terms of Altruism, Civic Virtue, Conscientiousness and Courtesy.
Job satisfaction: Job satisfaction is defined as an emotional response by Oshagbemi (2000), as a state of pleasure the employee gains from the job and experience by Tantiverdi (2008), as the overall feelings or attitude by Robbins (2000), as an internal state of an employee, which is an outcome of evaluation of the job with a certain degree of favor or disfavor by Brief (1998), Floyd and Wooldridge (1997) and Whittaker and Marchington (2003) and as a composition of task satisfaction, employment satisfaction and market satisfaction by Putman (2002).Job satisfaction encompasses several work place dimensions such as satisfaction with compensation, satisfaction with top management, satisfaction with promotions and satisfaction with coworkers (Vitell and Anusorn, 2008).
Job satisfaction in this study was measured using the cognitive based Job satisfaction scale developed by Weiss et al. (1967).Weiss et al. (1967) developed the highly accepted Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) to operationalise the JS dimensions.The MSQ has been cited as a job satisfaction measure with strong psychometric properties.It is most often evaluated as a two-dimensional measure of intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction (Price and Mueller, 1986).Hence the researchers have categorized the MSQ items into 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic' factors and proceeded to study their relationship with the OCB dimensions.

Job satisfaction and OCB:
A meta-analysis by Organ and Ryan (1995) established numerous attitudinal and dispositional predictors of OCB including job satisfaction and organizational commitment, whereas certain other studies attributed personal and personality variables, social exchange theory, leadership and equity theory for a better understanding of the variations in the OCBs (Niehoff and Moorman, 1993;Schnake et al., 1995).
Thus a significant relationship between JS and OCB (Smith et al., 1983;Organ, 1988;Organ and Ryan, 1995) has been established in various work environments (Bateman and Organ, 1983) among university employees; Konovsky and Organ (1996) among hospital employees; Lowery et al. (2002) among blue-collar workers; Moore and Love (2005) among IT professional (Samanvitha and Jawahar, 2013) among faculty in higher education institutions.According to Penner et al. (1997), job satisfaction is only one reason for the accurate prediction of Organizational Citizenship Behavior.Payne and Webber (2006) found that the employee satisfaction was positively related to service-oriented Organizational Citizenship Behaviors, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.Wegge et al. (2006) found that employees experiencing a high motivating potential at work reported more organizational citizenship behavior, higher job satisfaction and less turnover intentions.Researchers have also confirmed positive correlations of demographic factors such as age, gender on job satisfaction (Spector, 1997), pay (Spector, 1985) and level of education (Sinha and Sarma, 1962).However a few studies have concluded that JS was not positively correlated with OCB (Farh et al., 1990;Moorman, 1991).
In conjunction with the literature reviewed the following has been hypothesized: Hypothesis 1: The OCB construct comprising of Altruism, Civic Virtue, Conscientiousness and Courtesy is applicable to the Indian context.Hypothesis 2: There is a positive relationship between the Intrinsic Job satisfaction factors and OCB.Hypothesis 3: There is a positive relationship between the extrinsic Job satisfaction factors and OCB.

Model:
The present study primarily aims to explore the conceptual dimensions of the OCB construct in the Indian context and secondly to investigate on Job satisfaction as an antecedent of OCB.The cognitive measure of job satisfaction (Brief and Roberson, 1987) adopted in this study has been correlated with the OCB dimensions of Organ (1988).To evaluate the relationship between JS and OCB a research model has been developed (Fig. 1).

METHODOLOGY
Population, data and sample: Although an extremely large sample is not required for correlational studies, researchers do not recommend samples with fewer than 30 subjects (Ary et al., 2002).A sample size from 50 to 100 is regarded as a moderate size in order to assume that a relationship exists.ORBITZ Corporate and Leisure Travels (I) Pvt. Ltd. is a leading M.I.C.E (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, Exhibitions) and premium holidays (total travel Management Company).
It operates over 18 branches in India covering all major cities.It has its overseas operations covering Germany and Middle East.All of the Indian branches and their employees who were more than 75 full-timers have been considered as the population for the study, as it aims to explore the OCB and JS dimensions.Out of the 75 employees, 12 were from Coimbatore, 20 from Chennai, 12 from Hyderabad, 20 from Bangalore and 13 from Cochin.Thus Census method was adopted including all the employees of the branches of the study unit.

Measures:
Job satisfaction: Job satisfaction was measured using the highly accepted Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) developed by Weiss et al. (1967).which provides a cognitive Job satisfaction scale.It is most often evaluated as a two-dimensional measure of intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction (Price and Mueller, 1986).Hence the researchers have categorized the MSQ items into 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic' factors and proceeded to study their relationship with the OCB dimensions.
Organizational citizenship behavior: OCBs were measured using the scale including the items based on the definitions of the five OCB dimensions suggested by Organ (1988).The five OCB factors included altruism, courtesy, sportsmanship, conscientiousness, civic virtue.Sportsmanship behavior was not applicable to the organization under study and hence the dimension was removed from the scale.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this study, Cronbach's alpha estimate was employed to establish the reliability of scales used in the questionnaire.Cronbach's alpha is a reliability coefficient that measures internal reliability or consistency of items and is used to test multiple items scales (Vogt, 1999).The cronbach alphas for the intrinsic and extrinsic satisfaction were 0.796 and 0.748.The cronbach scores for the OCB constructs were 0.811.According to Nunnally (1978), an alpha coefficient of 0.7 or higher is necessary for an exploratory research or survey to be considered reliable, this questionnaire can be therefore be regarded as reliable (Table 1).
Two types of validity are important for a study.From standpoint of practice, face validity must be considered by the researcher who wishes to communicate the findings and gain support for implementing actions to improve the workplace.Face validity refers to the degree to which the instrument appears to measure the intended phenomenon (Leedy and Ormrod, 2001).In this study, face validity was addressed by grounding the study based on the literature on OCB and JS and by using survey items based on previously tested instruments.The content validity has been ensured by adopting instruments that have been extensively used, validated and tested for reliability in more than 30 studies.
All the items of the JS and OCB constructs had a mean score well above the midpoint (2.5 of a 5 point scale), indicating the significance of the dimensions (Table 2 and 3).
In this study, Bivariate Pearson correlation was used to test the relationship between the independent variables of Intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction dimensions and the dependent variable of OCB (consisting of Altruism, Civic Virtue, Conscientiousness and Courtesy dimensions).
This study provided support for the hypothesis that there exists a positive relationship between job satisfaction and OCB dimensions.The correlation coefficient for composite JS, Intrinsic JS factors and Extrinsic JS factors (0.653, 0.581 and 0.615, respectively) indicate a strong positive correlation.The Intrinsic JS factors correlated more strongly with courtesy dimension of OCB (0.511), where as the Extrinsic JS factors correlated more with the civic virtue dimension of OCB (0.549) (Table 4 to 6).To conclude, Extrinsic JS factors were confirmed to be more strongly associated with the OCB dimensions.
This study has thus supported and extended the general findings of Organ and Konosvky (1989)     that OCB is related to cognitions about work by showing the specific relationship between OCB and the cognitively-oriented job satisfaction measure (Brief and Roberson, 1987) adopted in the study.
One justification for this difference in the levels of correlations can be attributed to the difference in extrinsic and intrinsic items in the MSQ.For instance, the extrinsic items are based on the evaluation of one's satisfaction with the outcomes conferred upon them by someone else (pay, working conditions, policies and praise).For these items, the respondents must seek outside themselves and evaluate the relative value of "what they get."Organ and Near (1985) noted that the basis for cognitive satisfaction is for the most part "the appraisal, assessment, or evaluation of the composite external circumstances of life as made available to the individual, relative to some standard".The extrinsic items are more cognitive-based because they are a clear cognitive evaluation of the tangible opportunities and outcomes by the self.
On the other hand, the intrinsic items ask the respondent to indicate the degrees of satisfaction the job provides according to their own internal standards.Evaluations are made, which do imply cognitions, but these evaluations are more rooted with the emotions and feelings.Organ and Near (1985) state that the difference between more cognitive and more affective satisfaction is that with the affective "the emphasis is not so much the cool appraisal of 'what's out there' but what the individual feels, in terms of hedonic tone".
Therefore, this study does provide support for the hypothesis that cognitively based job satisfaction measures will be strongly related to OCBs.

CONCLUSION
Research limitation/implications: The findings of the study bear the limitations due to the sampling as well as the constructs of JS adopted.JS perception as an affective construct has not been considered.

Implications for practice:
This study provides the link between the JS factors and the OCB dimensions.The HR practitioners should benefit immensely out of the factor wise (intrinsic and extrinsic factors) JS influences on OCB.They may focus on the specific JS factors according to the organizational context and the requirements.
Summary: Therefore, this study does provide support for the hypothesis that cognitively based job satisfaction measures will be strongly related to organizational citizenship behaviors and can be considered as antecedent to OCB.This result also supports the observation of Organ and Konovsky (1989) that it might be best to think of OCB as more of a behavior subjected to cognition and controlled decision and not the result of a mere transient 'mood' or 'feeling'.

Fig. 1 :
Fig. 1: Research model depicting the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior

Statistical tools :
Correlation analyses were used to test the hypotheses.Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 16.0 was used to assimilate the data.

Table 2 :
Descriptive statistics-intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction factors

Table 5 :
Correlation-intrinsic JS factors and OCB dimensions Intrinsic JS factors

Table 6 :
Correlation-extrinsic JS factors and OCB dimensions Extrinsic JS factors