English

Jakisa Owor Joseph

doi:10.5897/ajbm2015.7954

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between human resource (HR) practices, employee engagement and organizational citizenship behaviours (OCB) in selected firms in Uganda. Adopting a pragmatic philosophy with a quantitative methods strategy using quantitative cross-sectional survey design (N = 210) the researcher examined the relationship between nine antecedents, employee engagement and one outcome – OCB. Self-administered questionnaire of four scales were administered to sampled employees of soft drink and sugar firms Kampala, Mukono and Buikwe districts of Uganda. Hypotheses were tested through correlation and hierarchical regression. All the nine antecedent variables studied were significantly related to employee engagement and employee engagement was significantly related to OCB. The hierarchical regression analysis results shows that five antecedent variables demonstrated a significant relation with OCB - role clarity, collaboration, job security, compensation fairness and development. This research has validated the organizational citizenship behaviour model, extended the engagement model and social exchange theory and established that all the nine antecedents studied were related to engagement but only five were significantly related to OCB. Key words: Employee engagement, antecedents, OCB, HR practices, employee development, job security, compensation fairness, collaboration, Uganda.

Highlights

Researchers within human resource management (HRM) field have been concerned with how HRM can lead to improved organizational performance (Huselid, 1995; Delbridge and Keenoy, 2010)
While early HRM studies tended to propose a direct link between HR practices and firm performance, recent evidence suggests that the relationship is most likely mediated by a range of attitudinal and behavioral variables at the individual level– employee engagement, task performance, and organizational citizenship behaviours (OCB) (Guest et al, 2004; Kuvaas, 2008; Snape and Redman, 2010)
Pearson‟s correlation analysis showed that employee engagement is significantly positively related to each of the nine antecedents – the coefficients ranging from r = 0.48 to r = 0.67 (Table 2)

Summary

Introduction

Researchers within human resource management (HRM) field have been concerned with how HRM can lead to improved organizational performance (Huselid, 1995; Delbridge and Keenoy, 2010). While early HRM studies tended to propose a direct link between HR practices and firm performance, recent evidence suggests that the relationship is most likely mediated by a range of attitudinal and behavioral variables at the individual level– employee engagement, task performance, and organizational citizenship behaviours (OCB) (Guest et al, 2004; Kuvaas, 2008; Snape and Redman, 2010). Prior HRMperformance-studies tended to focus on the macro level and proposed a direct relationship between the two, but lacked convincing theoretical explanations (Guest, 2011).

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion