What Is Job Satisfaction?

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Organizational Citizenship Behaviour through Job Design

Job satisfaction was found to partially mediate the effect of task significance on helping behaviour, and fully mediate the relationship between task autonomy and sportsmanship. All the effects of task autonomy on sportsmanship were the result of the positive impact that autonomy has on job satisfaction, whereas some of task significance’s effect on helping were not resulting simply from increased job satisfaction but were directly attributable to task significance itself.

A study on the below exercise indicated that

 Increased autonomy in the job will be positively related to helping behaviours independent of job satisfaction

 Increased autonomy in the job will be positively related to taking initiative behaviours independent of job satisfaction

 Increased skill variety in the job will be positively related to helping behaviours independent of job satisfaction

 Increased skill variety in the job will be positively related to taking initiative behaviours independent of job satisfaction

 Increased task identity in the job will be positively related to helping behaviours independent of job satisfaction

 Increased task identity in the job will be positively related to taking initiative independent of job satisfaction.

 Increased task identity in the job will be positively related to civic virtue independent of job satisfaction

Influence of Job Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment, Fairness Perceptions on OCB 5

According to studies, when all the above three variables are considered concurrently, only Organizational Commitment accounted for a unique amount of variance in OCB. Despite the predictive abilities of Job Satisfaction, perceptions of procedural justice and Organizational Commitment when taken alone, only Organizational Commitment emerged as a significant predictor of OCB. But, there is a substantial support for the relationship between job satisfaction and OCB as well.

Studies also reported that perceptions of procedural justice were significantly related to turnover intentions and the degree to which there existed conflict or harmony in the work group. Other studies have been published as well which have shown relationships between perceptions of fairness and positive organizational attitudes.

But, besides being important predictors of key job attitudes, perceptions of fairness may also promote effectiveness in organizations by influencing an individual employee’s decision to perform organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs).

It has been suggested that perceptions of fairness may be related to OCB because such perceptions are instrumental in developing the levels of faith and trust needed for employees to provide the beneficial, yet discretionary, behaviours that define citizenship. However, fairness perceptions are just one of several job attitudes that have been shown to relate to measures of organizational citizenship behaviour.

OCB AND THE JOB ATTITUDE - JOB PERFORMANCE RELATIONSHIP

Studies suggested that the reason why work attitudes were not related to performance was because we were looking at the wrong performance. Instead of traditional measures of in-role performance, we should be locking at more discretionary extrarole performance, like OCBs. Because the employee has greater control over the exercise of OCBs than of in-role requirements. Studies stated that the relationship between job attitudes and OCB should be greater than the relationships found between job attitude and in-role behaviour. Also, to "reduce inputs" in the form of decreased personal productivity invites sanctions and/or the denial of incremental pay. However, by being discretionary, OVBs would probably be subject to the influence of changing attitudes about the job or the company.

JOB ATTITUDE TO OCB RELATIONSHIP

Studies suggested that job attitudes may be more strongly related to OCBs than in-role performance, two job attitudes have been studied as possible antecedents: job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The first job attitude that was tested for a relationship with OCB was job satisfaction. A second job attitude found more recently to be related to OCB was organizational commitment. Organizational commitment describes "the relative strength of an individual’s identification with and involvement in a particular organization" and has been suggested as an antecedent to OCB because it reflects an employee’s willingness to aid the organization even if direct reward is not contingent upon that aid.

However, in another article, it was challenged the finding that both organizational commitment and job satisfaction may be predictors of OCB because those studies finding such relationships did not include and control for the relationship between either job satisfaction and OCB or organizational commitment and OCB. To remedy this, both job satisfaction and organizational commitment were measured along with a two-dimensional model of citizenship. It found that when the relationship between job satisfaction and OCB was controlled, no relationship was found between organizational commitment and OCB. On the other hand, when the relationship between organizational commitment and OCB was controlled job satisfaction still explained significant variance in OCB. It thus concluded that the relationship reported between commitment and OCB may be overstated.

Studies begun to question the relationship between job satisfaction and OCB. Citing examples of how job satisfaction measures may reflect a large component of job fairness judgments, studies suggested that the relationship between job satisfaction and OCB may be better stated as a relationship between job fairness and OCB. Employees are probably more likely to perform OCBs if they are in a condition of social exchange with the organization. Job fairness measures might capture more directly than job satisfaction measures the cognitive appraisal process which assesses the basis on which an employee can define his/her relationship with the organization as social exchange. Therefore, job fairness measures should be more effective predictors of OCB.

Another study tested the relative importance of job fairness and job satisfaction in predicting OCB and found that job fairness, in the form of procedural justice, was more strongly related to OCB than job satisfaction. In fact, when the relationship between

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