Government Employees’ Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Impacts of Public Service Motivation, Organizational Identification, and Subjective OCB Norms

ABSTRACT

This study attempts to provide an increased understanding of the antecedents of public employees’ organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Using a field survey involving public employees working for Korean local government organizations, the data analyses reveal that public service motivation (PSM), organizational identification, subjective OCB norms, task interdependence, and procedural justice are important antecedents of government employees’ OCB, even after partialling out the common method variance, whereas job satisfaction and distributive justice are not.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper is based on Dong Chul Shim's dissertation.

Notes

The responses that had unreasonable answers were deleted from further analysis. For example, when a respondent answered all the OCB items with all the highest or lowest values, it was judged that the individual was not carefully responding to the items.

Although the shortened versions of Perry's scale have been widely used in previous studies (e.g., Alonso and Lewis 2001; Coursey, Yang, and Pandey 2012; Pandey, Wright, and Moynihan 2008), it should be noted that the items used in this study originated from one component (commitment to the public interest). Items of attraction to public policy were not included, since they did not have much theoretical association with OCB, and items from compassion and self-sacrifice were deleted from analysis, due to their cross-loadings with OCB items in the initial confirmatory factor analyses.

In the preliminary data analyses, several demographic variables [sex, tenure in current organization, tenure in public sector jobs and position (manager or non-managerial employee)] were also considered. However, these variables were excluded in the final data analyses since they were not jointly significant in the preliminary multiple regression analysis [F(3, 425) = 1.73 (n.s.)].

Readers should note that some of these effects were only significant at the level of p < 0.10 in the models that did not partial out common method variance.

The unexpected results might occur due to multicollinearity problems. For example, the associations between OCB and secondary job satisfaction and other traditional variables were found to be positive in the initial model. However, after PSM, whose association with secondary job satisfaction was high (r = 0.65), was inserted, the unexpected negative association between secondary job satisfaction and OCB was found in Model 5. After common variance factor was controlled, the association between secondary job satisfaction and OCB (r = 0.10) and the associations of the secondary job satisfaction with PSM (r = 0.38) became moderate. As a result, no significant association was found in in Model 8. The associations of extrinsic job satisfaction with OCB could be understood in the same vein.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dong Chul Shim

Dong Chul Shim ([email protected]) earned his PhD at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany (SUNY). He is currently an assistant professor at Department of Public Administration at Korea University. His research interests include government employees’ career motivation, leadership, and citizenship behaviors.

Sue Faerman

Sue Faerman is a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research and teaching focus on the paradoxical nature of organizational and managerial leadership performance, and on women and leadership. She currently serves as Dean of the University's College of Computing and Information and as Academic Chair of the Women's Leadership Academy at the University's Center for Women in Government & Civil Society.