Organizational citizenship behavior in Chinese society: a reexamination

Abstract

Organizations in emerging economies such as China have attracted an increasing amount of research attention during the past few decades, and it is time to scrutinize findings from earlier studies. In this paper, we test the psychometric soundness of a widely used indigenous measure of organizational citizenship behavior in the Chinese context developed by Farh, Earley, and Lin ((1997), ‘Impetus for Action: A Cultural Analysis of Justice and Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Chinese Society,’ Administrative Science Quarterly, 42, 421–444). Using multiple samples from Mainland China, we performed systematic tests of the content validity, discriminant validity, factorial validity and nomological validity of this five-dimension measure. We found that their two culture-specific dimensions, namely (harm to interpersonal) harmony and (personal use of organizational) resources, in fact measure the construct of deviant behavior, and cannot prove the existence of indigenous contents. We discuss our results in light of the ongoing convergence–divergence debate, and provide suggestions to further improve the quality of indigenous research.