Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Reducing Office Employee Corruption

These days, instead of following rigid and inflexible organizational hierarchy, both employers and employees are inclined towards independent and autonomous teams. This fact has already emphasized the importance of staff cooperation and innovation. Generally, the category of professional behavior which exerts a massive impact on organization operational efficiency attracts a lot of managers' and researchers' attention. However, in most cases attention is paid to the staff in-role performance. Nearly, for two decades, researchers have distinguished a huge difference between in-role and extra-role performance. By this, they mean the type of performance which goes beyond official roles of employees that are not usually considered by official governmental rewarding system.


Introduction
These days, instead of following rigid and inflexible organizational hierarchy, both employers and employees are inclined towards independent and autonomous teams. This fact has already emphasized the importance of staff cooperation and innovation. Generally, the category of professional behavior which exerts a massive impact on organization operational efficiency attracts a lot of managers' and researchers' attention. However, in most cases attention is paid to the staff in-role performance. Nearly, for two decades, researchers have distinguished a huge difference between in-role and extra-role performance. By this, they mean the type of performance which goes beyond official roles of employees that are not usually considered by official governmental rewarding system. So far, diverse definitions for Organizational Citizenship Behavior have been presented, among which the following has been put forward as: Organizational Citizenship Behavior is a sort of individual and volunteer behavior which is not directly designed by organizational rewarding systems. In spite of the lack of rewarding system, the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization is enhanced.
In addition to the above definition, further various definitions of Organizational Corruption are offered: Up to now, several definitions of the term Corruption have been documented. Yet, the term Corruption, is generally defined as the act of encouraging people to wrong doing through bribery or other wrong and illegal means. Moreover, Organizational Corruption is considered as the deeply-rooted individualized abuse of public property by employees. Corruption is deemed as abusing of one's power and capacity for achieving team or individual goals and interests. Corruption is the projection of a type of government officials behavior (whether politicians or government employees) that through wrong and illegal channels, authorities or their relatives are prospered. Abusing public authority and capacity is the main and prime means of that prosperity.
Finally, Office Corruption is usually considered as deviation from legal procedures in fulfilling ones duty. Generally, any type of illegitimate use of one's post and position is referred to as corruption [1].
In the following lines, the longitudinal process of studies into organizational citizenship behavior is dealt. This part of the present paper, steps which have been taken to curb the office corruption are touched upon.
Through centuries, there has been a reverse relationship between proper usage of power and authority and the growth of corruption. Whenever people in power applied their power and authority properly and legally, there has been a decrease in corruption. Corruption is classified as one of the organizational effects which greatly undermine the development of the countries.

Theoretical basis
Organizational citizenship behavior: There has been no readymade general agreement on citizenship behavior among researchers. For instance, aspects such as contributing behavior, manliness, forgiveness, organizational loyalty, following the orders, innovativeness, individual progress conscientiousness, altruism, etc. are scrutinized as different aspects of citizenship behavior.
In 2000, these types of behavior were classified in great details by Podsakuf in which organizational citizenship behavior was divided in the following seven categories: altruism, obedience or following the rules, respect and etiquette and manliness.
Citizenship performance is an umbrella term for activities that helping others doing their job, protecting one's organization, volunteering to do extra marginal jobs or feeling responsible.
Considering the above mentioned definitions regarding aspects of citizenship behavior and studies done by various researchers, it is safe to claim that the most significant and reliable aspect of citizenship behavior is introduced by Organ in 1988. Organ in his several books and publications (including "Features of a Model Soldier") has embarked on presenting a definition of aspects of citizenship behavior that addresses the following: Altruism, manliness, social etiquettes or civil virtues, sense of responsibility or conscientiousness, civility and courtesy.
Altruism: Altruism is defined as voluntary behavior which aims at aiding others in the organization while considering ones duties and organizational relationships (such as offering voluntary help to new, less experienced employees or over-worked ones or filling in for absentees).

Sense of Responsibility or Conscientiousness:
Sense of responsibility and conscientiousness is defined as a voluntary move toward helping the organization in which the employee has recourse to the least facilities (such as voluntary behavior alongside their own specified duties, observing organizational rules and avoiding wasting office time).
Organ also believes that people endowed with advanced citizenship behavior continue doing their job even in face of severe hardship, illness and fatigue which implies immense sense of conscientiousness.
Manliness: Manliness refers to employees' willingness to endure conditions in which the lowest ideal job standards are met without too much of complaining.
Courtesy: As a definition of courtesy one may touch upon preventive measures avoiding job related problems in dealing with other employees.

Social manners and etiquettes:
These issues reflect behaviors which indicate responsible cooperation of the individuals in organizational affairs. They also fall into the category of activities such as extracurricular and spare time performance when there is no pressure on them, supporting progress and proposed changes by managers of organization, eagerness to study books and periodicals and upgrading their general knowledge. Also they tend to put up signs and posters in their workplace to maximize others knowledge and awareness.
Department corruption: In this part, several aspects of department corruption are clarified.
Financial corruption, it is divided in the following subcategories: Bribery, embezzlement, corruption at the time of purchasing private sector goods on the part of government, corruption at the time of signing contracts on government behalf.

Tax-related corruption:
Abusing government goods and property by individuals, not meeting working standards, reporting sham missions, spending office hours on non-job-related activities, property theft by employees, extravagance and squandering, preferring nepotism over department regulations, corrupted attitudes towards identification and subsequent curbing illegal measures (leniency and forgetfulness towards the issue of corruption), corrupt practices of delivering goods in government sectors, corrupt practices in issuing social and financial licenses.
Corruption while employing new workforce (not following regulations and legibility criteria while either choosing the new work force or promoting them).
On the other hand, there are diverse classifications of department corruption which some experts on corruption put into main category of accidental and intentional. Other groups of experts believe that there are two types of corruption: individual and group corruption.
According to Hidenmire, there three sorts of department corruption: Black, Gray and White.
Black department corruption signifies activities which both common people and the political elites in every society consider hateful. Both two groups of people firmly believe that responsible bodies and entities for that kind of corruption must be penalized and punished.
Gray department corruption embraces activities from political elites in every society are considered hateful, however common people are indifferent towards them. For instance, whenever government employees fail to observe the rules which are not very popular among common people. These kinds of rules are merely considered vital and significant by elites of the society.
Finally, white department corruption refers to activities which seemingly are illegal but majority of the members of the society (either elites or laypeople) do not consider significant or harmful enough to embark on legal procedure to punish the wrong doers. For instance, ignoring observing the rules which have already lost its significance through social or cultural changes [3].
Considering the issue of corruption from different perspective, one may face three types of this pitfall: Political corruption: Generally, political corruption is defined as abusing ones political power and leverage so as to achieve personal illegal objectives. Political power and corruption go hand in hand. In other words, there would be no political corruption unless a group of people are holding power [4]. One may quote John Jacques Russo, "Political corruption is the natural aftermath of power struggle among social classes".
By legislative corruption, it means passing discriminatory laws and policies favoring politicians in power as well as social prejudiced classes. Then, the idea held by public that corruption merely include activities in contrast with law cannot be deemed so tenable [5].
Department corruption is referred as a corollary of overlap between inner and workplace interactions and it emerges from very organizational context. Published documents surviving the early Chinese and Indian governments indicate the thousand year governmental concern over the abuse of public property and official positions by individuals. Department corruption has remained a cause for concern for many years, especially alongside the rapid expansion of government activities in running and managing societies. This emerging importance and concern has called for particularly more innovative methods in dealing with that. In this part of the present paper a number of previously done researches are looked into from a fresh perspective. Six factors, in all, have been considered effective in shaping organizational citizenship behavior between managers and employees. They are: Devotion, Sense of Duty, Loyalty, Attention, Tolerance, and Manliness. Among successful and unsuccessful organizations, employees' sense of duty indices ranked the highest and the tolerance the lowest. In these organizations, regarding humanistic indices related to citizenship behavior, namely devotion, cooperation (civil, social office duty, protective) and attention, there has not been a significance difference. However, considering organizational factors in studies departments, there has been a significant difference in the issues of sense of duty, manliness and loyalty [6].
Major factors in shaping organization citizenship behavior are:

Leadership features
There is a positive relationship between organization entrepreneurial skills and organization citizenship behavior [7].
Under the influence of occupational features, organization citizenship behavior can be established and then enhanced [8].
Cooperation between employees in performing services their tendencies has proved to be significant in offering better services. This consequently plays an important role in furthering profiteering, collaboration and cooperation between employees for research projects. High quality of the services offered by employees leads to higher organized performance and plays a key role in meeting the client's needs. There is proven relationship between overall organizational citizenship behavior and knowledge and information dispersion.
A positive and significant relationship between employee's empowerment and their organizational citizenship behavior has been established [9]. Major reasons for department corruption are as follows: 1) Financial hardships and emergencies experienced by state sector employees.

5) Shortcomings in laws and regulations
To deal with corruption in department of education, organizational, managerial, cultural, social, political and financial strategies have proved effective, respectively [10].
Citizenship behavior falls into the category of useful and efficient organizational structure. Staff's feeling of confidence can potentially affect organizational citizenship behavior. There is a significant relationship between working parties and organizational citizenship behavior on departmental level. Activities in the form of working parties decreases organizational citizenship behavior on individual level [11,12]. Also, there has been proved to be a positive relationship between respect and decorum and the quality of data in organizations that are managed through ERP. Between cooperation, collaboration and the quality of data in organizations that run through ERP, actually a relationship has been established.
In this study, it is assumed that organizational citizenship behavior, through its five-fold aspects (altruism, social norms, respect and decorum, manliness and conscientiousness) affects the process of staff organizational corruption drop. A comprehensible model of the research is given in Scheme 1.
The main objective of the present research has been formulated in the following question: To what extent organizational citizenship behavior (in five aspects) affects the drop of organizational staff corruption in West Azerbaijan province?

Objectives of the Research
The main purpose of this study is to study the impact of organizational citizenship behavior of the employees in West Azerbaijan province on the drop of organizational corruption. In this line, the following lines of inquiry are pursued: 1) Studying and evaluating the effect of social aspect of organizational citizenship behavior of staff on reducing departmental corruption.
2) Studying and measuring the effect of altruistic aspect of organizational citizenship behavior of staff on reducing departmental corruption.
3) Studying and measuring the effect of conscientiousness aspect of organizational citizenship behavior of staff on reducing departmental corruption.

4)
Studying and measuring the effect of manliness aspect of organizational citizenship behavior of staff on reducing departmental corruption. Practical aim of the present study is to: Offering suggestions to elevate the incorruptibility of the organizations due to the staff organizational citizenship behavior and the related aspects under investigation.

Methodology
Considering the goals and objectives, the present study is quantitative and practical in nature and a number of questions in the stage of data collection have been employed. The participants in the study included MSc, MA and PhD holders in different departments and organizations in West Azerbaijan in 2010. Data collection was performed through categorical random sampling. Total number of the participants is 250 whose total statistical sample mounted to 152. The total number of 147 questionnaires was returned which formed the basis for the data analysis. The data analysis was done in three stages. In stage one, based on the obtained data from the questionnaires, the tables, bar graphs and charts were drawn. The second stage covered the descriptive statistics of variance, mid-variation and curved-variation. Stage three touched upon a review of the hypothesis employing Pearson co-variation ordinary linear regression analysis for testing null hypothesis and multiple regression analysis for testing research question.

Hypothesis I
Fairness or manliness aspect of organizational citizenship behavior plays an effect on reduction of department staff corruption in West Azerbaijan province.
In order to put the first null hypothesis, ordinary linear regression formula was employed. In the case of the subsequent null hypothesis (aspects of organizational citizenship behavior), department corruption equaled with vantage coefficient.
The results of the study indicate that the aspect of fairness and manliness in organizational citizenship behavior exerted an impact on reduction department corruption in West Azerbaijan.

Hypothesis II
The aspect of etiquette and decorum in organizational citizenship behavior proved to be effective in reduction of department corruption in West Azerbaijan province.
The results point to the fact that the aspect of etiquette and decorum in organizational citizenship behavior has been effective in reduction of department corruption in West Azerbaijan province.

Hypothesis III
The aspect of conscientiousness in organizational citizenship behavior proved to be effective in reduction of department corruption in West Azerbaijan province.
The results point to the fact that the aspect of conscientiousness in organizational citizenship behavior has been effective in reduction of department corruption in West Azerbaijan province.

Hypothesis IV
The aspect of altruism in organizational citizenship behavior proved to be effective in reduction of department corruption in West Azerbaijan province.
The results point to the fact that the aspect of altruism organizational citizenship behavior has been effective in reduction of department corruption in West Azerbaijan province.

Hypothesis V
The aspect of social manners in organizational citizenship behavior proved to be effective in reduction of department corruption in West Azerbaijan province.
The results point to the fact that the aspect of social manners in organizational citizenship behavior has been effective in reduction of department corruption in West Azerbaijan province.

Research hypothesis
Citizenship behavior exerts an effective impact on reduction of organizational citizenship behavior in West Azerbaijan province.

Conclusion
It is predicted that a reduction of department corruption is reduced through independent factor of organizational citizenship behavior which covers five aspects (fairness, decorum, conscientiousness, altruism and social manner). The observed discrepancy can be observed and measured by applying linear regression formula (department corruption equaled with vantage coefficient). The formula indicates that one-unit discrepancy and an increase in the mentioned aspects, independent variant in the formula, leads to a reduction in department corruption equal to vantage coefficient Table 1.
Subsequently, organizational citizenship behavior plays an undeniable role in reduction of corruption in organizational citizenship behavior. The following Table 2 is an interpretation of the reduction.
In this part, each one of the above mentioned aspects of the organizational citizenship behavior is prioritized according to the related vantage coefficient which is indicates the degree of the effectiveness in respect of every single aspect.