Job attitudes and personality : predictors of organizational citizenship behaviour

Abstract

The goals of the current study were: (1) to examine the relationships among multi-dimensional measures of job attitudes (employee morale), personality factors, and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), and (2) to examine the incremental variance accounted for by personality and morale in each of the OCB dimensions under investigation (helping, civic virtue, and sportsmanship). Employees (n = 102) of a government agency participated in the study and completed self-reports assessing morale (job satisfaction and organizational commitment), personality, and OCB.

The current study supports the argument that morale and personality predict OCB. Affective job satisfaction, affective commitment, and all of the Big Five personality characteristics were related to helping. Affective and contextual job satisfaction, affective commitment, neuroticism and extraversion were related to civic virtue. Sportsmanship was not related to morale but was related to all of the personality variables with the exception of openness to new experiences. Personality explained 23% of the variance in helping, 16% of the variance in civic virtue, and 23% of the variance in sportsmanship. Morale accounted for an additional 9% of the variance in helping and an additional 11% of the variance in civic virtue beyond that explained by personality.