The Relationship between Organizational Commitment and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors in the Public and Private Sectors

Dorota Grego-Planer

doi:10.3390/su11226395

Abstract

Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs) are activities which are voluntary, go beyond the formal obligations of employees, and significantly affect the efficiency of the entire organization. The literature has devoted a lot of attention to them since the beginning of the 1980s. Not only has the nature of OCBs been studied, but so too have their dimensions and antecedents. However, there is a fairly significant research gap in the area of employee manifestations of citizenship behaviors according to type of organization (private and public sectors). This article addresses the issue of organizational commitment as one of the antecedents of OCBs. The research objective is to identify and assess the level of correlation between individual dimensions of organizational commitment and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors in public and private organizations in Poland. A quantitative study conducted on a sample of 323 employees allowed the hypotheses to be verified. In general, there are similar frequencies of Organizational Citizenship Behaviors in the public and private sectors. In public institutions, however, OCBs in the interpersonal dimension are more frequent, while in private institutions they occur more commonly in the organizational dimension. Most positively correlated with OCBs is the affective dimension of organizational commitment.

Highlights

The term ‘Organizational Citizenship Behaviors’ (OCBs) was coined in the 1980s
The research was primarily intended to show the frequency of display of organizational citizenship behaviors in public and private organizations
In order to check whether the structure of responses to the questions varied depending on the type of organization in which the respondents worked, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov α compliance test was applied with a significance level of 0.05

Summary

Introduction

The term ‘Organizational Citizenship Behaviors’ (OCBs) was coined in the 1980s. It means, employee behaviors that are not subject to a formal system of obligations but that have a positive impact on the functioning of the organization. In today’s extremely fast-growing, and very complex, organizations it is important that as many employees as possible exhibit behaviors that go beyond the formal scope of tasks. With such a competitive and global market, this can have a huge impact on the success of the organization

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Conclusion