Contextualizing Organizational Citizenship Behavior: How context may change the expected relationship between Idiocentrism and Employee Behaviors
Keywords: Unit level OCB, OCB, Cultural Values, Idiocentrism, Lebanon, HLM
Abstract
This research examines organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) using a multi-level, contextualizing approach. Borrowing from theory in international management and organizational behavior, context is conceptualized as multi-level and as a shaper of meaning and variability in employee citizenship behaviors. By centralizing a unique socio-cultural, political and historical national context (i.e., omnibus context) at the core of our theorizing, we hypothesized, contrary to previous research, a positive relationship between idiocentrism and employee engagement in organizational citizenship behaviors. Furthermore, we explored the influence that unit level OCB (i.e., discrete context) has on the idiocentrism - OCB relationship. Our analysis confirms this positive relationship in this context. In addition, our cross-level analysis suggests that in workgroups with higher levels of unit level OCB, idiocentrism is more strongly related to employee citizenship engagement. The findings highlight the value added in contextualizing research on OCB and international management studies in general.
Key Words: Unit-level OCB, OCB, Cultural Values, Idiocentrism, HLM
1. Introduction
There has been a growing interest in contextualizing research in organizational behavior (Rousseau and Fried, 2001), international management studies (Tsui, 2004; Fischer, 2009; Child, 2000); and, more specifically, Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB; Ehrhart Naumann, 2004; Fischer, Ferreira, Assmar, Redford, and Harb, 2005). It is becoming more and more apparent as business become more global, that a change in context or contextual variables can have profound effects on the meaning and manifestation of OCB (Paine and Organ, 2000)....