A study on how organizational citizenship behavior influences on human resource management

Article history: Received July 28, 2013 Received in revised format 20 November 2013 Accepted 8 January 2014 Available online January 11 2014 During the past few years, there have been some evidences to believe that organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) could significantly influence on the success of organizations. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of OCB on human resource management. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some 260 experts who worked for an Iranian auto industry. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale, examines three hypotheses including the relationship between conscientiousness and information quality, courtesy and work efficiency and between civic virtue and work efficiency. Cronbach alphas for Courtesy, Civic virtue and Information Quality are calculated as 0.75, 0.76 and 0.81, respectively. Using structural equation modeling, the study has confirmed existence of positive and meaningful relationships among various components of the survey, which confirms all three hypotheses of the survey. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
For years, there have been questions on what would be the best approach for service organizations to make an assessment on employees and how to improve their capabilities to retain existing customers and attract new customers (Morrison, 1996;Stamper & Dyne, 2001;Bell & Menguc, 2002;Organ, 2006).In addition, there were some interests on detecting necessary motivations to deliver high quality services.In fact, it is important to enable a service organization to formulate a system, which could build a link between human resource management policies and desired service employee performance, which helps organizations reach better financial outcomes.Bienstock et al. (2003) investigated organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), with its framework of organizational rights and responsibilities, to detect these issues.The study indicated that service employee perceptions of how they were treated by the service organization, were positively associated with organizational citizenship behaviors.In addition, the study showed that these behaviors could result in more effective service delivery to organizational standards and enhanced customer perceptions of service quality.Yoon and Suh (2003) investigated the relationships of employees' OCBs with job satisfaction, trust in manager, and customer's perceived service quality in travel agencies.The survey indicated that contact employees' job satisfaction and trust in manager were substantially associated with OCB and that their active engagement in OCB had a positive association with the perception of service quality.Donavan et al. (2006) applied the marketing concept in service firms through individual service employees and their interactions with customers.They reported that the positive influence of customer orientation on certain job responses seems to be stronger for service workers who spend more time in direct contact with customers than for workers who spend less time with customers.Walumbwa et al. (2010) examined the effect of servant leadership on two group climates, employee attitudes, and OCB.Their empirical investigation indicated that commitment to the supervisor, selfefficacy, procedural justice climate, and service climate partially mediated the relationship between servant leadership and OCB.They also reported that procedural justice climate and positive service climate amplified the impact of commitment to the supervisor on organizational citizenship behavior.Konovsky and Pugh (1994) investigated a social exchange model of OCB by proposing an employee's trust in a supervisor to mediate the relationship between procedural fairness in the supervisor's decision making and employee citizenship.Dimitriades (2007) investigated the influence of service climate and job involvement on customer-oriented organizational citizenship behavior in Greek service organizations.They reported that the concept of customer-oriented OCB was a useful construct in the Greek context.Podsakoff et al. (1997) performed another survey and reported that helping behavior and sportsmanship had substantial impacts on performance quantity and that helping behavior had an important effect on performance quality.However, the study did not find any relationship between civic virtue and performance measure.Podsakoff et al. (2009) provided a meta-analytic examination of the relationships between OCBs and different individual as well as organizational-level outcomes.Their results indicated that OCBs were associated with a number of individual-level outcomes, including managerial ratings of employee performance, reward allocation decisions, etc. Besides, OCBs were detected to be associated with a number of organizational-level outcomes including productivity, efficiency, reduced costs, customer satisfaction, and unit-level turnover.They also reported some stronger relationships between OCBs and unit-level performance measures providing some evidence that OCBs were associated with these criteria.

The proposed study
For many years, researchers were interested in investigating the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and organizations performance.In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to study the effects of OCB on human resource management.The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some 260 experts who worked for auto industry.The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale, examines three hypotheses as follows, 1.There is a relationship between conscientiousness and information quality.2. There is a relationship between courtesy and work efficiency.3.There is a relationship between civic virtue and work efficiency.
The proposed study uses structural equation modeling to examine different hypotheses of the survey.Cronbach alphas for Courtesy, Civic virtue and Information Quality are calculated as 0.75, 0.76 and 0.81, respectively.Table 1 demonstrates the results of factor analysis.Next, we present details of our findings on testing three hypotheses of the survey.

The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on testing various hypotheses of the survey.

The first hypothesis: The relationship between conscientiousness and information quality
The first hypothesis of the survey investigates the relationship between conscientiousness and information quality.The implementation of path analysis yields a positive impact from conscientiousness towards information quality (β=0.49, t-value=13.76, sig<0.05)when the level of significance is five percent.Therefore, the first hypothesis of the survey has been confirmed.

The second hypothesis: The relationship between courtesy and work efficiency
The first hypothesis of the survey investigates the relationship between courtesy and work efficiency.The implementation of path analysis yields a positive impact from courtesy towards work efficiency (β=0.50, t-value=8.50,sig<0.05)when the level of significance is five percent, which confirms the second hypothesis of the survey.

The third hypothesis: The relationship between civic virtue and work efficiency
The last hypothesis of the survey investigates the relationship between civic virtue and work efficiency.The implementation of path analysis yields a positive impact from civic virtue towards work efficiency (β=0.68,t-value=6.68,sig<0.05)when the level of significance is five percent, which confirms the third hypothesis of the survey.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to study the effects of organization citizenship behavior on human resources management.The proposed study has considered the effects of conscientiousness, courtesy and civic virtue on information quality as well as work efficiency.The proposed study has been implemented among different employees who worked for an Iranian automaker.The result of the survey has confirmed that there was a meaningful relationship between conscientiousness and information quality.This means that people with good discipline feel more responsible on accomplishing their tasks and performing good quality duties.The survey also concluded that there was a meaningful relationship between courtesy and work efficiency, which means people with good behaviors, may contribute more on firm.Finally, the survey has reported that there was a positive impact from civic virtue towards work efficiency.

Table 1
The summary of factor analysis * 0.54