An investigation on the role of organizational climate on organizational citizenship behavior

Article history: Received July 28, 2013 Received in revised format 20 November 2013 Accepted 4 January 2014 Available online February 7 2014 This paper presents an empirical study to investigate the effect of organizational climate on organizational citizenship behavior in one of Iranian automakers. The proposed study uses a standard questionnaire for measuring organizational citizenship behavior, which is adopted from Podsakoff et al. (2000) [Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Paine, J. B., & Bachrach, D. G. (2000). Organizational citizenship behaviors: A critical review of the theoretical and empirical literature and suggestions for future research. Journal of management, 26(3), 513563.]. The study also uses another questionnaire, which measures organizational climate, which is adopted from Arabacı (2010) [Arabacı, I. B. (2010). Academic and administration personnel's perceptions of organizational climate (Sample of Educational Faculty of Fırat University). Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(2), 4445-4450.] and both questionnaires are designed in Likert scale. Cronbach alphas for organizational citizenship behavior and organizational climate are measured as 0.78 and 0.84, respectively, which are above the acceptance level of 0.70. Therefore, we can confirm the validity of both questionnaires. The study is implemented among 200 experts in Iranian automaker, randomly and using Spearman correlation ratio as well as stepwise regression techniques, the study has detected a meaningful relationship between components of organizational climate and organizational citizenship behavior.


Introduction
During the past few years, there have been growing interests in investigating various factors influencing organizational citizenship behavior (Raub, 2008;Matiaske & Weller, 2007).Chiang and Hsieh (2012) studied the effects of perceived organizational support and psychological empowerment on job performance by looking into the mediating impacts of organizational citizenship behavior.They reported that perceived organizational support and psychological empowerment positively influenced organizational citizenship behavior.However, perceived organizational support did not positively affect job performance.While psychological empowerment and organizational citizenship behavior positively impacted job performance, organizational behavior acted as a partial mediator between perceived organizational support and job performance.Koster and Sanders (2006) aimed at contributing to the debate on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) by developing a theory-driven measure of cooperative behavior within organizations, called organizational solidarity (OS) and recommended that supervisors could play a facilitating role in creating and sustaining cooperative behavior of employees.Korkmaz and Arpacı (2009) investigated the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior and emotional intelligence and reported that emotional intelligence of the organizational citizenship behavior of followers.Organ and Ryan (1995) performed a meta-analttic review of attitudinal and dispositional predictors of organizational citizenship behavior.Allen (2003) investigated organizational climate and strategic change in higher education and discussed how a change on educational climate could make changes on educational development.Boiral (2009) performed an investigation on the pertinence of organizational citizenship behaviors in improving the efficacy of environmental management.They explained how the principal dimensions of these behaviors could be used to the environmental practices of organizations and underlined their importance in responding to essential challenges of environmental management, including the complexity of environmental issues, limitations of formal management systems.Chiaburu and Baker (2006) investigated the antecedents of taking charge, an extra-role behavior (ERB) directed at challenging the status-quo.They found some support for the distinctiveness of taking charge, a kind of ERB, which challenges the status-quo, from traditional ERB.Wang and Ahmed (2004) performed an investigation on the development and validation of the organizational innovativeness construct using confirmatory factor analysis.They identified five dimensions of an organization's overall innovativeness through an extensive literature review and these five dimensions formed the component factors of the organizational innovativeness construct.

The proposed study
This paper presents an empirical study to investigate the effect of organizational climate on organizational citizenship behavior in one of Iranian automakers named Saipa.The proposed study uses a standard questionnaire for measuring organizational citizenship behavior, which is adopted from Podsakoff et al. (2000).The study also uses another questionnaire, which measures organizational climate, which is adopted from Arabacı (2010) and both questionnaires are designed in Likert scale.There were 42 questions associated with the proposed study of this paper where 4 questions are associated with risk taking, 5 questions covered organizational commitment, 4 questions were related to reward and promotion, 6 questions were associated with team-work, 3 questions studied organizational structure, 4 questions are related to organizational communication and 3 questions were associated with organizational conflict.The sample size is calculated as follow, where N is the population size, represents the yes/no categories, and N=350, the number of sample size is calculated as n=152.We have distributed 200 questionnaires among some experts in automaker of the proposed study.In our suvey, 72.94% of the participants were male and 27.06% of them were female.Fig. 1 shows details of other personal characteristics of the participants.

Years of experience
Age Years of education

Fig. 1. Personal characteristics of the participants
As we can observe from the results of Fig. 1, more participants in our survey were male.Besides, they were mostly middle age people and mostly university educated.

The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on testing the effects of seven organizational climate on organizational citizenship behavior.We have performed normality test using Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and determined that all data were normally distributed.Therefore, we apply Pearson correlation ratio to test the effects of various organizational climate on organizational citizenship behavior summarized in Table 1 as follows, The results of Table 1 show that organizational citizenship behaviormaintains positive and strong correlations with risk taking (r=0.283,Sig.= 0.000), organizational commitment (r=0.409,Sig.= 0.000), reward and promotions (r=0.331,Sig.= 0.000), team-work (r=0.320,Sig.= 0.000), organizational structure (r=0.437,Sig.= 0.000), organizational communication (r=0.462,Sig.= 0.000).However, there is no meaningful relationship between organizational conflict and organizational citizenship behavior.We have performed a stepwise regression analysis between organizational citizenship behavioras dependent variable and organizational climate components as independent variables and the results are summarized in Table 2 as follows, The results of Table 2 indicate that organizational citizenship behavior has positive relationship with organizational structure (β = 0.586), organizational commitment (β = 0.539) and team work (β = 0.501).

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented a study on the relationship between organizational climate and organizational citizenship behavior.Using an existing questionnaires for organizational climate and organizational citizenship behavior, the survey has concluded that organizational citizenship behavior had positive relationship with organizational structure, organizational commitment and team work.
The results of this survey are some what consistent with earlier findings reported by Arabacı (2010), Boiral (2009) and Podsakoff et al. (2000).

Table 1
The summary of Pearson correlation between organizational climate and organizational citizenship behavior

Table 2
The summary of stepwise regression model