Organisational citizens or reciprocal relationships? An empirical comparison
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480610682271 |
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| Pages | 519-537 |
| Author | Ferry Koster,Karin Sanders |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Organisational citizens
or reciprocal relationships?
An empirical comparison
Ferry Koster
Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and
Karin Sanders
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims at contributing to the debate on organisational citizenship behaviour
(OCB) by developing a theory-driven measure of cooperative behaviour within organisations, called
organisational solidarity (OS).
Design/methodology/approach – Data are gathered through a survey among 674employees from
nine organisations. Scales are constructed using the multiple group method. OLS regression is used to
test the hypotheses.
Findings – The data analyses show that reciprocity is an important mechanism to bring about
cooperationwithin organisations.Based on this, a distinctionis made between horizontaland vertical OS.
Research limitations/implications – The major shortcoming of this research is that some of the
results may be influenced by same source bias. The research implies that cooperative types of
employee behaviour – such as OCB – depend on thebehaviour of others. Furthermore, these kinds of
behaviour can be divided into a horizontal and a vertical dimension.
Practical implications – The findings suggest that supervisors can play a facilitating role in
creating and sustaining cooperative behaviour of employees.
Originality/value – This paper contributes to the literature on OCB by examining how this kind of
behaviour is affected by the behaviour of supervisors and co-workers. Secondly, whereas other articles
focus on either horizontal or vertical dimensions of cooperative behaviour, this paper focuses on both
dimensions simultaneously.
Keywords Employee behaviour,Behaviour, Industrial relations,Organizations
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
For more than 65 years,managers and organisational researchers have been interestedin
cooperative types of behaviour of employees. Writing in 1938, Barnard characterized
effectiveorganisations as systems in which individualscooperate to reach organisational
ends. Cooperative types of behaviour and attitudes have been conceptualised under
different headings, such as “willingness to cooperate” (Barnard, 1938), “organisational
loyalty” (Hirschman, 1970; Hage, 1980), “organisational commitment” (Mowday et al.,
1982), and “extra-role behaviours”, (Van Dyne et al., 1995), such as “organisational
citizenshipbehaviour” (Organ, 1988), “contextual performance”(Borman and Motowidlo,
1993), and “prosocial organisational behaviour” (Brief and Motowidlo, 1986).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm
The authors would like to thank Werner Raub, Frans Stokman, Henk Kiers, Stefan Thau, and
Heidi Armbruster for their valuable comments to earlier versions of this paper.
An empirical
comparison
519
Personnel Review
Vol. 35 No. 5, 2006
pp. 519-537
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/00483480610682271
Organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB: Organ, 1988) is the most frequently
studied form of cooperative behaviour. It consists of employee behaviour that has an
overall positive effect on the functioning of the organisation, but cannot be enforced by
the employment contract. Although researchers’ interest in this type of behaviour has
grown over the years, there are ongoing debates regarding the content, causes and
possible effects of OCB (Podsakoff et al., 2000). OCB research focuses mainly on
cooperative behaviour as an individual characteristic of the employee, and tries to
explain why some employees behave more cooperatively than others. Therefore, it
neglects the reciprocal nature of cooperative behaviour. In this paper, we argue that the
nature of cooperative behaviour is that it involves at least two persons, is directed to
specific others, and is affected by the behaviours of others. This means that cooperative
behaviour should not be examined as an individual characteristic of employees, but as a
characteristic of the interpersonal relationship including the behaviour of others. In this
paper, we introduce the concept of organisational solidarity (OS) that focuses on
cooperative behaviour in interpersonal relationships within organisations. We argue
that employee behaviour is influenced by the behaviour of supervisors and co-workers.
Since these relationships qualitatively differ from each other, we should make a
distinction between them (Smith et al., 1995). Therefore, we study the relationships
employees have with their supervisors (vertical) and their co-workers (horizontal).
The first aim of this paper is to examine if the idea of distinguishing between
behaviour in horizontal and vertical relationships makes sense. We develop OS based
on an existing theory of solidarity. The second aim of this paper is the empirical
comparison between OS and two existing dimensions of OCB, with special attention to
the effect of behaviour of others. The research question of this paper, therefore, reads:
RQ1. Can the different dimensions of organisational solidarity be distinguished
from each other and is reciprocity of cooperative behaviour an important
mechanism in explaining this behaviour?
The paper is structured as follows. It starts with an overview of issues in OCB research
in Section 2. In Section 3, a theory of workplace solidarity is introduced and hypotheses
are formulated. The research data are described in Section 4. The method of analysis
and results are presented in Section 5 and in Section 6 these results are discussed.
Issues in OCB research
OCB research was originated in the early 1980s (Bateman and Organ, 1983; Smith et al.,
1983). In a recent review of this field, OCB was defined as:
Individual behaviour that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal
reward system, and that in aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organisation.
By discretionary, we mean that the behaviour is not an enforceable requirement of the role or
job description, that is, the clearly specifiable terms of the person’s employment contract with
the organisation; the behaviour is rather a matter of personal choice, such that the omission is
not generally understood as punishable (Organ, 1988, p. 4).
In the 20 years following, the amount of research on OCB increased tremendously (for a
review and a sketch of the historical development of this research, see Podsakoff et al.,
2000). Although OCB has proven itself a fruitful concept for research, the same issues
emerged in different studies (LePine et al., 2002; Motowidlo, 2000). The first problem
concerns what kinds of behaviour should be classified as OCB. For instance, many
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