Dimensionality of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) in a Multicultural Society: The Case of Malaysia

Past researches have observed a shift in the dimensions of organizational citizenship behavior. Building on organizational citizenship behavior literature, the present study in the paper involved looking at validating the dimensionality of the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) measure developed by Organ (1988) who posited a five dimension instrument. Data was gathered through a survey using a structured questionnaire to employees working in 10 large manufacturing companies in Malaysia. A total of 113 questionnaires were returned over a period of 10-week. A series of tests such as factor analysis, correlation, and reliability analysis was conducted to confirm that the instrument is valid (content, construct, convergent, discriminant and nomological) as well as reliable. Implications regarding the value of conducting validity and reliability test for practitioners and researchers are discussed.


Introduction
Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) was first illustrated in the work of Bateman and Organ (1983) 24 years ago and has recently been gaining momentum. OCB refers to the individual contributions in the workplace that go beyond role requirements as stipulated in the job agreement (Organ & Ryan, 1995). OCB of the organizational members is becoming increasingly crucial in the businesses nowadays in view of the downsizing, rightsizing in response to the economic pressures of the last decade. Hence, understanding how OCB works in organizations is an important issue of enquiry for both researchers and also practitioners. Recent studies had illustrated the dramatic growth of OCB researches into some other related management areas, for example, strategic management, leadership, human resources management, etc. OCB has been noted to have contributed favorably to organizational outcomes, such as service quality (Bettencourt & Brown, 1997;Bell & Menguc, 2002), organizational commitment (Podsakoff, McKenzie & Bommer, 1996), job involvement (Dimitriades, 2007), leader-member exchange (Bhal, 2006;Lo, Ramayah & Jerome, 2006).
Despite the importance of examining organizational citizenship behaviors in organizational for leadership effectiveness, a review of the literature have revealed a lack of consensus about the dimensionality of OCB, particularly in the Malaysia context. As stated by LePine, Erez, and Johnson (2002), these behavioral dimensions have yet to be differentiated from one another in the empirical literature even though many scholars have claimed that OCB is composed of conceptually distinct behavioral dimensions. Studies have found that there are approximately 30 forms of citizenship behavior have been developed (Podsakoff, Mackenzie, Paine & Bachrach, 2000) and generally it can be grouped into seven dimensions known as, (i) Helping Behavior, (ii) Sportsmanship, (iii) Organizational Loyalty, (iv) Organizational Compliance, (v) Individual Initiative, (vi) Civic Virtue, and (vii) Self Development.
Hence, building upon the social exchange theory, the purpose of this study is to assess the validity (content, construct, convergent, and discriminant) and reliability of Organ's (1988) measures of centralization and formalization and, thereby to add clarity to the operationalization of this construct. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. First, the foundation literature for the study will be reviewed, followed by research method, and findings are presented and discussed. Lastly, research suggestions are offered, and the contribution and the limitations of the study are highlighted.

Organizational citizenship behavior
OCB has been widely used in the previous studies as it has been found to affect the overall organizational effectiveness (Walz & Niehoff, 1996). OCB is also known as extra-role behaviors which are the act of performing beyond the stated job requirement. Subordinates impulsively go beyond the employment contract and carry out non-obligatory task without expecting explicit rewards and recognition (Organ, 1988). Hence, understanding the determining conditions and reasons that lead to such behaviors is instrumental to yield an insight into when and how these acts happen. In fact, LePine et al. (2002) have demonstrated that leaders' support is the strongest predictor of significant OCB by subordinates. According to Aquino and Bommer (2003), they discovered that OCB can enhance the social attractiveness in a work unit. As OCB is normally labeled as positive behavior, those who exhibit OCB may become more socially attractive which makes them more likely to be appreciated as friends or partners.
Literatures in the past have identified two main approaches known as "role" and "extra-role behavior" in defining the concept of OCB. Extra role means the individual contributions in the workplace which go beyond the specified role requirements and not recognized by the reward system. Castro, Armario, and Ruiz (2004) concluded that it is not easy for a firm to differentiate between "role" and "extra role" performances as managerial and employee perceptions of their subordinates' performances do not correspond and subject to the satisfaction of the subordinates in the workplace. A great deal of researches have suggested that there are five basic personality factors which affect most of the variance in personality (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1992) and these dimensions are known as Big Five dimensions which are classified as conscientiousness, altruism, courtesy, sportsmanship, and civic virtue. Hence, this study adopts the repertoire of Organ's initial definition of OCB with five dimensions and each dimension is discussed more in details in the following sessions.

Civic virtue
Civic virtue is defined as subordinate participation in organization political life and supporting the administrative function of the organization (Deluga, 1998). It is referring to the responsibility of the subordinates to participate in the life of the firm such as attending meetings which are not required by the firm and keeping up with the changes in the organization (Organ, 1988). This dimension of OCB is actually derived from Graham's findings which stated that employees should have the responsibility to be a good citizen of the organization (Graham, 1991).These behaviors reflect an employees' recognition of being part of organization and accept the responsibilities which entails (Podsakoff et al., 2000). Other researchers have found that civic virtue enhances the quantity of performance and help to reduce customer complaints (Walz & Niehoff, 1996).

Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness is used to indicate that a particular individual is organized, accountable and hardworking. Organ (1988) defined it as dedication to the job which exceed formal requirements such as working long hours, and volunteer to perform jobs besides duties. In addition to that, studies have also revealed that conscientiousness can be related to organizational politics among employees (McCrae & Costa, 1987). Kidder and McLean Parks (1993) posited the fact that males are more like to engage in conscientious behavior than females in view of the fact that males has preference for equity over equality.

Altruism
Smith, Organ, and Near (1983) defined altruism as voluntary behaviors where an employee provides assistance to an individual with a particular problem to complete his or her task under unusual circumstances. Altruism refers to a member helping other members of the organization in their work. Podsakoff et al. (2000) has demonstrated that altruism was significantly related to performance evaluations and correspondingly, positive affectivity.

Courtesy
Courtesy includes behaviors, which focus on the prevention of problems and taking the necessary step so as to lessen the effects of the problem in the future. In other words, courtesy means a member encourages other workers when they are demoralized and feel discouraged about their professional development. Early research efforts have found that employees who exhibit courtesy would reduce intergroup conflict and thereby diminishes the time spent on conflict management activities (Podsakoff et al., 2000). Organ (1988) defined sportsmanship as the behavior of warmly tolerating the irritations that are an unavoidable part of nearly every organizational setting. Podsakoff and MacKenzie (1997) revealed that good sportsmanship would enhance the morale of the work group and subsequently reduce employee turnover.

Research methodology
The main focus of this paper is to assess the goodness of measure (validity and reliability) of the organizational citizenship behavior measurement. The environment in which this study was carried out was in the Malaysian manufacturing sector.

Sample
Data for this study was collected from 113 managers working in 10 large scale manufacturing firms in Malaysia. The questionnaires, together with cover letters (seeking their cooperation and explaining the purpose of the study) and self-addressed stamped envelopes (for the completed questionnaires) were mostly personally handed to managers after a brief personal communication concerning the topic and the goals of the study.

Survey instrument
This study uses the five dimensions of OCB proposed by Organ (1988) as researchers have acknowledged the dimensions as the most widely used in organizational related studies (Gonzalez & Garazo, 2006). Twenty items were used to determine the level of citizenship behaviors among subordinates based on five main dimensions. Likert-like scale was used to measure the OCB elements, which used the anchors of 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree).

Sample Characteristics
Out of the 113 respondents, 61% of them were male, and 39% were female. The respondents were managers from different functional areas and were between the age group of 20 to 54 years. Twenty eight percent of the respondents hold bachelor degrees, followed by diploma holder (38%), and the rest have high school qualification (34%). A majority, 89% of them have been working for less than 10 years, whereas 11% of the respondents have worked for more than 10 years.

Content Validity
Content validity refers to the extent to which an instrument covers the meanings included in the concept (Babbie, 1992). In a similar vein, Rubio, Berg-Weger, Tebb, Lee, and Rauch (2003) refer to content validity as to the extent to which the items on a measure assess the same content or how well the content material was sampled in the measure. Essentially, the goals of content validity are to clarify the domain of a concept and judge whether the measure adequately represents the domain (Bollen, 1989). Content validation results in a theoretical definition that explains the meaning of the variable in question (Bollen, 1989) and is guaranteed by the literature overview (Gomez, Lorente & Cabrera, 2004).

Construct Validity
Researchers often use factor analytic techniques to assess construct validity of the scores obtained from an instrument (McCoach, 2002). Factor analysis represents a broad category of approaches and mathematical procedures for determining the latent variable structure of observed variables (Nunnally, 1978). In this study, an exploratory factor analysis with an orthogonal rotation of varimax was used to evaluate the construct validity of the instrument. In turn, to evaluate the construct validity, we performed a principal components analysis on the set of 20 items of the scale. The result of this analysis is summarized in Table 1.
The analysis extracted only a 4 factor solution, each with eigenvalues above one, which explain 59.64% of the total variance. The KMO was 0.817 indicating a meritorious level based on Kaiser and Rice (1974) and the Bartlett's test for sphericity was significant (χ2 = 976.34, p , 0.01). Based on the rotated component matrix, out of the 20 items, 4 items were dropped either due to loadings less than 0.55 based on a sample size of 100 suggested by Hair et al. (2006) or cross loading in another component. Even though there were some items where cross loadings slightly exceeded 0.30, those items were retained because factor analysis should take into consideration the need for a conceptual basis for the variables analyzed (Hair et al., 2006).

Convergent Validity
Further to the construct validity test using the factor analysis (between scales) another factor analysis but this time using the within scale was utilized to test the convergent validity. According to Campbell and Fiske (1959), convergent validity refers to all items measuring a construct actually loading on a single construct. Convergent validity is established when items all fall into 1 factor as theorized. Convergent validity was carried out through a within factor, factor analysis in order to obtain a more in-depth judgment of the dimensionality of the construct under study (Hair et al, 2006). All the four factors displayed unidimensionality with Civic Virtues, KMO was 0.84 explaining 59 percent of the variation; Conscientiousness, KMO was 0.76 explaining 58 percent of the variation; Altruism, KMO was 0.70 explaining 76 percent of the variation; Courtesy, KMO was 0.74 explaining 60 percent of the variation. Thus, the analysis provided evidence of convergent validity.

Discriminant Validity
Discriminant validity refers to the extent to which measures of 2 different constructs are relatively distinctive, that their correlation values are neither an absolute value of 0 nor 1 (Campbell and Fiske, 1959). A correlation analysis was done on the 4 factors generated and the result is presented. As can be seen all the factors are not perfectly correlated where their correlation coefficients range between 0 or 1. Hence, we can conclude that discriminant validity has been established.

Nomological Validity
Nomological validity which is another form of construct validity is the degree to which a construct behaves as it should within a system of related constructs called a nomological set (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). Cronbach and Meehl (1955) posited that in order to provide evidence that a measure has construct validity, a nomological network has to be developed for its measure. In essence what this means is that we have to develop a nomological link between the variable we would like to validate and another variable which has been proven theoretically to be related to this particular variable. For example it has been proven in many researches that commitment increases as job satisfaction increases. So when we validate the construct validity of a job satisfaction measure, we will use commitment to test the nomological validity. Leader-Member exchange (LMX) has been shown to significantly influence the level of OCB among employees as a high quality of LMX may motivate employees to exhibit extra-role behaviors without any formal rewards from the organizations. (Settoon et al., 1996). As LMX has been shown to be related to OCB, we used the Loyalty-Affect dimension of LMX to be correlated with the 4 dimensions of OCB and the result is presented in Table 3. As theorized, all the 4 dimensions were significantly related to LMX thus confirming nomological validity.

Reliability
Reliability measures the degree to which the test score indicates the status of an individual item on the factors defined by the test, as well as the degree to which the test score demonstrates individual differences in these traits (Cronbach, 1947as cited in McCoach, 2002. "A reliability coefficient demonstrates whether the test designer was correct in expecting a certain collection of items to yield interpretable statements about individual differences" (Cronbach, 1951, p. 297 as cited in McCoach, 2002. Generally, Nunnally (1978) proposed 0.70 to be the minimum acceptable standard for internal consistency. The reliability coefficient was 0.82 for civic virtue, 0.74 for conscientious, 0.85 for altruism and 0.76 for courtesy. Hence, it can be concluded that these measures posses sufficient reliability.

Discussion and conclusion
The positive contribution of OCB to organizational performance is well acknowledged by the literatures (e.g., Castro et al., 2004;Podsakoff & Mackenzie, 1997;Emmerik & Euwema, 2007). However, understanding the importance of the dimensionality of OCB can be extremely useful for organizational behavior studies. Although the dimensionality of OCB has been studied in previous researches, no known researches have been found to empirically study the dimensionality of OCB in the Malaysia context. Hence, this study has added to the growing body of research in OCB by using a series of tests to test for validity and reliability of the constructs. Preliminary results demonstrated a valid (content, construct, convergent, disriminant and nomological) as well as reliable four dimension scale for measuring OCB.
This study has chosen large scale manufacturing companies' employees in Malaysia as respondents as there exists bidirectional relationship between supervisors and their subordinates. Currently, the manufacturing sector is considered as one of the cornerstone of Malaysia's economic diversification strategy. As revealed by Abdullah (1996), Malaysian managers are only familiar with one level of interaction; hence, it is time to learn through exposure to different work settings, social interaction, and observation of work related practices not only in intracultural levels, but at the intercultural levels, and cross-cultural levels.
This study starts by testing the 20 items from five dimensions of OCB as proposed by Organ (1988). Nonetheless, Bolino (1999) has argued that it is necessary to seek further insight into the topic given the high correlation among some of its dimensions. In this research, it was found that only four dimensions of OCB, namely civic virtue, conscientious, altruism, and courtesy are capable of explaining sufficient variation in the construct being measured. Nonetheless sportsmanship was not found to be a valid dimension in Malaysia context. The result is not surprising as OCB may be referred as a general tendency to be cooperative within an organizational setting (LePine et al., 2002;Koster, 2007). In addition to that, previous researchers have demonstrated that "helping behavior" has a negative effect on organizational performance (Castro, 2004), hence it is not surprising to see that sportsmanship is not an important dimension in OCB, particularly in Malaysia. The results of this study show some interesting similarities and differences concerning the dimensionality of OCB. Thus, having a guide like the present study to follow can be very helpful to researchers in OCB related areas.

Limitations and future research
Although the study has provided sufficient insights into the studied dimensions of OCB, the results could not be generalized in view of the fact that all the variables were taken form the same source and there is a possibility of common methods variance. Thus, longitudinal studies are likely to provide a better insight into the dimensionality of OCB over a period of time. In addition, different cultural and international contexts may limit the generalizability of results. It is unclear whether the findings may have the same implications for OCB in different cultural environment as the values of the participants in this current study might not accurately represent the values of other countries'. Comparative studies across professions, cultures, and industries are needed in order to truly understand many of the constructs included in this study.