A study on the relationship between emotional intelligence , organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior

Article history: Received December 2, 2013 Accepted 8 May 2014 Available online May 19 2014 This paper presents a casual structure model between emotional intelligence and organizational citizenship behavior by using organizational commitment as mediator variable. The study is accomplished among 324 employees of united bus company in city of Tehran, Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study has confirmed that emotional intelligence influenced on organizational citizenship behavior and commitment. The study also confirms that organizational commitment influenced on organizational citizenship behavior. Finally, the study has confirmed that there were significant relationships between emotional intelligence and its dimensions with organizational citizenship behavior and organizational commitment of employees. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
During the past few years, there have been tremendous efforts on learning the effects of various factors on organizational commitment (OC), organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).Emotional intelligence (EI) is believed as one of the most important issues affecting on employees' commitment.Khalid et al. (2009) investigated the effect of personal factors, EI and OCB on deviant behaviors using the data taken from 263 undergraduate business students from a public university located on the northern region of Peninsular Malaysia.They reported that sportsmanship and EI significantly and negatively associated with deviant behaviors.The results also indicated that male students and those with lower academic achievement had substantially higher level of deviant behaviors.Kim et al. (2005) examined the relationship between employee service orientation including customer focus, organizational support, and service under pressure and employees' job satisfaction, OC, and employees' intention of leaving by developing a structural equations modeling framework.They reported that the customer focus of employees was negatively related to employees' job satisfaction, but positively related to their organizational commitment.In addition, organizational support influenced positively on job satisfaction and job satisfaction was positively associated with OC.Jain (2009) examined the predictive capability of OCB and EI with regard to organizationally relevant criteria including job satisfaction, personal effectiveness, reputational effectiveness, etc.They reported that OCB was a powerful predictor of organizationally relevant criterion variables.Kondratuk et al. (2004) evaluated the relationship between career mobility history and a recent internal or external job change on OC using Meyer and Allen (1991) three-dimensional model.In this survey, they reported that external career mobility history was negatively associated with normative commitment, but not to affective and continuance commitment.Affective and continuance commitment were substantially lower for external movers prior to a move when compared with nonmovers over the same time.

The proposed study
This paper presents a casual structure model between emotional intelligence and organizational citizenship behavior by using organizational commitment as mediator variable.The study is accomplished among 600 employees who worked for united bus company in city of Tehran, Iran.The sample size is calculated as follows, where N is the population size, and N=600, the number of sample size is calculated as n=320.The study is accomplished among 324 employees of united bus company in city of Tehran, Iran.The study uses a standard questionnaire developed by Bradberry and Greaves (2004, 2006, 2009) for measuring emotional intelligence, which maintains four perspectives with 28 questions.For measuring organizational commitment, the study uses another standard questionnaire developed by Meyer and Allen (1991) with 3 dimensions and 24 questions.Finally, the study uses a standard questionnaire developed by Podsakoff et al. (2000) with 5 dimensions and 20 questions.Cronbach alphas for emotional intelligence, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior have been calculated as 0.937, 0.938 and 0.934, respectively, which are well above the minimum acceptable level of 0.7.The study considers the following three hypotheses, 1. Emotional intelligence influences positively on organizational citizenship behavior.2. Emotional intelligence influences positively on organizational commitment.3. Organizational commitment influences positively on organizational citizenship behavior.
The study uses structural equation modeling in order to examine the hypotheses of this survey.Fig. 1 shows details of the personal characteristics of the participants.In our survey, most participants were middle-aged male and they hold some university educations.In addition, nearly, 90% of the participants had at least five years of job experiences.Kolmogorov-Smirnov test has been applied to verify the normality of survey and Table 1 summarizes the results of our survey.

Table 1
The results of Kolmogorov-Smirnov test on three components of the survey As we can observe from the results of Table 1, all components of the survey are normally distributed when the level of significance is five percent.Therefore, we may use parametric test to verify the hypotheses of the survey.The implementation of t-value test on Emotional intelligence, Organizational citizenship behavior and Organizational commitment are 14.51, 11.60 and 13.68, respectively and they all meaningful when the level of significance is one percent.

The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on testing different hypotheses of the survey based on the implementation of structural equation modeling.Fig. 2 shows details of our findings,

Fig. 3. The results of t-value coefficients
As we can observe from the results of statistical observations such as t-student values as well as RMSEA and Chi-Square values, all statistical observations are meaningful when the level of significance is one percent.In addition, the relationships among different components are positive, which verifies all hypotheses of the survey.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have performed an empirical investigation to study the effects of emotional intelligence on organizational commitment as well as organizational citizenship behavior in a publication transportation organization in city of Tehran, Iran.The study has confirmed that emotional intelligence influences positively on organizational commitment (β = 0.88, P-Value = 0.000).In addition, organizational intelligence influences on organizational citizenship behavior positively (β = 0.47, P-Value = 0.000).Finally, organizational commitment influences on organizational citizenship behavior (β = 0.43, P-Value = 0.000).The results of the survey are consistent with findings of Farh et al. (2004), Kirkman and Shapiro (2001), Kim (2006), Brief and Motowidlo (1986) and Paine and Organ (2000).

Fig. 1 .
Personal characteristics of the participants