Citizenship in the Workplace : Examining Work Attitudes as Predictors among French Employee

Organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) has been a subject of continually increasing interest in academic managerial literature. While most current research comes from the United States, several scholars have argued for the need for global data. As Podsakoff, MacKensie, Paine and Bachrach (2000, p. 556) insist, “cultural context may affect a) the forms of citizenship behaviour observed in organizations and b) the strengths of relationships between citizenship behaviour and its antecedents and consequences.” New targets of commitment (commitment to the supervisor and to the workgroup) have appeared. New forms of citizenship (civic virtue and sportsmanship) may be added to these. Empirical relations between various targets of commitment and these new forms of citizenship remain to be clarified in the French context. This paper proposes explore empirical links between foci of commitment, job satisfaction, and job involvement and OCB to determine which attitude explains which forms of citizenship.


Introduction
The theme of citizenship in the workplace is currently very popular in the organizational behaviour and human resource management literature.The study of organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) has a long history.As Organ (1988) and Podsakoff, MacKensie, Paine, and Bachrach (2000) remind us, the theme of citizenship in the workplace has roots in "the desire to cooperate" described by Barnard in his classic work The Function of the Executive.It is developed in the writings of Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939), in the experiments of Elton Mayo, and then in the work of Katz and Khan (1978).During the last twenty years, various forms of OCB have been identified.In less than that time, the number of related concepts has increased threefold.Already in the mid-1980s, Brief and Motowidlo (1986) were able to distinguish thirteen different constructs.In their critical review of the literature, Podsakoff et al. (2000) recognized thirty different forms.Several years later, LePine, Erez, and Johnson (2002), in turn, listed forty-odd concepts.Furthermore, in a recent publication on the nature, causes and consequences of OCB, Organ, Podsakoff, and MacKenzie (2006) present eleven different conceptualizations, themselves combining a number of forms of OCB (See particularly pp. . In this paper, the approach adopted to examine OCB is consistent with the developments of Organ and his colleague (Bateman & Organ, 1983;Organ, 1988;Smith, Organ, & Near, 1983), OCB refers to "discretionary individual conduct, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal system of compensation contributing to the general good functioning of the organization that does not arise from the prescribed role or tasks of the job, in other words, the specific terms of a contract between employees and organizations; this behaviour arises rather from personal choices, in such that its omission is not generally understood as punishable (Organ, 1988)." Since those first developments of Organ et al., variations have been suggested.Early research focused on altruism and conscientiousness.Altruism "is the act of helping others on work-related matters."Conscientiousness refers to "the willingness to perform beyond the minimal requirement in the areas of attendance, taking breaks, and working overtime."Several years later, Organ (1988) introduced civic virtue and sportsmanship as forms of OCB to consider.Civic virtue refers to behaviour promoting the organization's image, reputation, high profile, etc.It also relates to an employee's attitude towards wishing to participate to varying degrees and in different ways in the firm's governance.Finally, sportsmanship is defined by Organ (1990) as "willingness of the employee to tolerate less than ideal circumstances without complaining."Subsequently, Podsakoff and MacKensie (1994) recommend dropping conscientiousness which can no longer be seen as discretionary behaviour because their results show that managers see this as expected in the workplace.Studying OCB requires consideration of these various adjustments.Nowadays, research based on Organ's model most often examines citizenship in the workplace through helping behaviour, sportsmanship and civic virtue, though certain researchers continue to use the original forms of OCB (e.g., Cohen, 2006;Schappe, 1998).
While most current research comes from the United States, several scholars have argued for the need for global data.As argue Podsakoff et al. (2000), "cultural context may affect a) the forms of citizenship behaviour observed in organizations and b) the strengths of relationships between citizenship behaviour and its antecedents and consequences."To date, little research has been done in the French context and existing research does not sufficiently take conceptual advances into account in the French context.While a number of studies have been published using samples of French employees (Vontrhon and Dagot, 2003;Grima, 2007;Paillé, 2004), the possible influence of cultural context on 1) citizenship structure and 2) the impact of attitudes at work has been neglected.The goal of the current research is twofold.First, we propose to examine the dimensionality of citizenship at work on French employees to determine the salient forms of OCB.Secondly, we propose to examine possible links with a number of workplace attitudes.Finally, our intention is to collect data to determine which workplace attitudes explain which forms of OCB in the French context.

OCB Structure and Dimensions
On the whole, up until the end of the 1990s, OCB was primarily studied in North America.Helping behaviour, sportsmanship and civic virtue are the three principal forms of OCB studied by researchers following in Organ's footsteps.Research on American employees focuses on different forms of OCB in varying combinations.To date, we note four types of configuration.
For several years now, OCB research has been done outside of U.S. context.For example, empirical data have been provided on Chinese employees (Chen & Francesco, 2003), Australians (Feather & Rauter, 2004), Germans (Thau et al., 2004), Malaysians (Coyne & Ong, 2007), Africans (Ehigie & Otukoya, 2005), Arabs (Shaw, Delery, & Abdulla, 2003), Dutch and Belgians (Lievens & Anseel, 2004), Israelis (Cohen, 2006), andEnglish (Coyle-Shapiro, 2002).The fact that this list continues to grow shows that the existence of behaviours related to OCB is no longer questioned by researchers around the world.At the same time, a consensus is emerging around the notion of the possible impact of cultural context on OCBs.A number of researchers (Lievens & Ansel, 2004;Motowidlo, 2000;Paine & Organ, 2000;Podsakoff et al., 2000) believe that the cultural context could influence the structure of OCBs.Nonetheless, it is astounding to observe that cultural context as an influential factor is often ignored.In fact, we frequently find research outside of North America adopting models tested in the U.S. context, while neglecting any possible influence of the cultural context in which the research is being conducted.Therefore, there is a great risk of reaching flawed conclusions.As mentioned earlier, a number of empirical studies have used samples of French employees (Dagot & Vontrhon, 2003;Grima, 2007;Paillé, 2007;Paillé, 2004).The theme of citizenship in the French cultural context is, thus, not new.Yet further research is necessary because none of the research on French employees has systematically investigated the factorial structure of OCBs, as recommended by Lievens and Anseel.For their part, Dagot and Vonthron (2003) and Paillé (2004) studied citizenship as a whole without a rigorous analysis of the structure.More recently, Grima (2007) studied OCBs with a three-factor model (civic virtue, sportsmanship and helping behaviour) without a prior structural analysis.To date, only one study has examined OCB structure.Using the CFA technique, Paillé (2007) obtained a structure in 4 dimensions (altruism, helping, civic virtue and sportsmanship).

Satisfaction, Commitment, Involvement and Citizenship in the Workplace
One of the present study's objectives is to examine the possible influence of a number of attitudes on OCBs in the French cultural context.In the following sections, we focus on job satisfaction, multiple targets of commitment and job involvement.

Job satisfaction
Job satisfaction is one of the most studied attitudes in the organizational context (Dorfmann & Zapf, 2001;Lease, 1998).The current literature has reached a consensus on considering job satisfaction the result of an employee's evaluation of his or her work (e.g., Judge, Bono, & Locke, 2000;Testa, 2001;Weiss, 2002).Consistent with this orientation, we could say that the state of satisfaction is merely the result of an evaluation process through which employees value or are dismissive of their work.A negative evaluation of the workplace environment engenders employee dissatisfaction.On the other hand, a positive evaluation leads to a feeling of satisfaction.In the latter case, employees express gratitude towards the organization and feel the need to build a lasting relationship, partially based on the desire for reciprocity (MacKenzie et al., 1998).This context of mutual exchange encourages employees to develop OCBs.Analysis of the relationships between job satisfaction and OCBs has generated a considerable volume of empirical work (e.g., Bateman & Organ, 1983;MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Ahearne, 1998;Rioux & Penner, 2001;Schappe, 1998;Smith et al., 1983;Tansky, 1993;Williams & Anderson, 1991).In the current state of knowledge, relations are more often positive (e.g., Podsakoff et al., 2000), or sometimes nonexistent (e.g., Konovsky & Organ, 1989;Schappe, 1998;Williams & Anderson, 1991), but they are never negative.These results were obtained with altruism and conscientiousness, two forms of OCB operationalized by Smith et al. (1983).The broader approach of Organ (1988) allows us to evaluate a greater number of links with job satisfaction.Incorporating the older approach of Smith et al. (1983), studies are introducing other forms of citizenship (for example, courtesy, civic virtue, and sportsmanship).Tansky (1993) conducted one of the earliest studies to test the association of this new approach to job satisfaction.The data the researcher collected on a sample of manager show that job satisfaction is empirically and positively correlated to courtesy and civic virtue.In contrast, no significant correlation was obtained to altruism, sportsmanship or peacemaking.More recently, Yoon and Suh ( 2003) studied only three relationships with job satisfaction.Their results reveal that job satisfaction is linked to sportsmanship and civic virtue and is not associated with altruism.The findings in this section demonstrate that satisfied employees tend to develop OCB.We currently lack empirical data allowing us to determine whether this is true of French employees.It thus strikes us as reasonable to pursue the current trends in the literature.
Hypothesis 1: Job satisfaction and OCB are positively correlated.

Employee commitment
Affective commitment to the organization refers to individuals identifying with the organization's values, accepting its goals and making significant efforts at work (Meyer & Herscovitch, 2001).Affective commitment to the organization is a major determinant of OCBs (e.g., LePine et al., 2002;Podsakoff et al., 2000).Sharing values and organizational goals is accompanied by an employee's higher affective commitment to the organization which encourages tendencies towards efficient behaviour at work.The relationship between OCBs and affective commitment to the organization was explored in the 1980s (O'Reilly & Chatman, 1986), only a few years after the first works on the association with job satisfaction (Bateman & Organ, 1983;Smith et al., 1983), such that, from our perspective, the interest generated by affective commitment to the organization in the field of OCBs is no more recent than that of job satisfaction.Only the amount of empirical research in the 1980s differentiates them, since job satisfaction is the attitude most studied as a determinant (Schappe, 1998).However, it was really only at the start of the 1990s that affective commitment to the organization became a topic of significant research interest.A review of the literature reveals that most knowledge on the relation between affective commitment to the organization and OCB concerns the aspects touching altruism and conscientiousness.The vast majority of empirical relations are positive and significant (e.g., Bishop, Scott, & Burroughs, 2000;Chen & Francesco, 2003;Schappe, 1998).Certain findings provide data that contradict this tendency since an absence of a relationship is sometimes observed (Williamson & Anderson, 1991).Researchers who used Organ's expanded taxonomy shed no greater light on the issue (e.g., Rioux & Penner, 2001;Tansky, 1993;Yoon & Suh, 2003).Tansky (1993) finds no significant correlation between affective commitment to the organization and altruism, conscientiousness, courtesy, civic virtue and sportsmanship.The researcher attributes this result to the possible influence of other variables, without, however, naming them.Rioux and Penner (2001) find positive relationships with altruism, civic virtue and sportsmanship.These data are partially confirmed in the most recent research of Yoon and Suh (2003), since the latter show that only civic virtue and sportsmanship correlate with affective commitment to the organization.While certain research sometimes finds no correlation, in most cases, the association between affective commitment to the organization and OCB is positive.Based on the results of the literature discussed in this section, it seems feasible to postulate positive, significant relationships.Consequently, Hypothesis 2a: Commitment to the organization and OCB are positively related Recently, the academic literature has admitted the existence of other targets and it now regularly provides empirical data demonstrating the utility of associating them in studying employee commitment.This extension of the research framework is based on the critical analysis of Reichers (1985) and various empirical works of Becker et al. (Becker, 1992;Becker & Billings, 1993;Becker, Billings, Eveleth, & Gilbert, 1996).In this approach, the organization is a target of commitment, much like the profession chosen (Meyer, Allen, & Smith, 1993), the supervisor (Stinglhamber, Bentein, & Vandenberghe, 2002) or even the work team (Bishop et al., 2000).Up to now, little research has focused on the effects of the multiplicity of targets of commitment on OCB.A few results are currently available (Becker, 1992;Bentein, Stinghlamber, & Vandenberghe, 2002;Bishop et al., 2000).Becker (1992) shows that introducing complementary targets of commitment (for example, towards top management, supervisor and colleagues) which alongside affective commitment to the organization significantly raises the variance of two of these three forms of OCB analysed in the research.Indeed, unlike altruism and conscientiousness, idleness seems less sensitive to the multiplication of targets of commitment.For their part, Bishop et al. (2000) have shown that the outcome of modelling a structural equation is that commitment to the organization and commitment to the team influence OCB, studied as a single dimension, simultaneously and positively.More recently, Bentein et al. (2002) examined relations between commitment and OCB by looking at these two concepts for three targets, the superior, the workgroup, and the organization.Three researchers' results show, on one hand, that employees are affectively closer to the "workgroup" and more distant from the entities of "the organization" and "the supervisor" and, on the other hand, that this proximity has the effect of improving OCB prediction.The preliminary results suggest positive correlations between OCB and commitment to the colleagues and commitment to the supervisor.Consequently:

Job involvement
Job involvement refers to a cognitive belief state of psychological identification with one's job (Brown & Leigh, 1996).Only recently, the empirical relationships between job involvement and OCB have been studied.Indeed, neither the literature review of Podsakoff et al. (2000), nor the recent work of Organ, Podsakoff and MacKensie (2006), mentions the existence of data allowing for clarification of the association between job involvement and OCB.Job involvement remains an important topic of debate in recent literature.Indeed, it is a considerable factor in job satisfaction (Brown, 1996).Job involvement also turns out to be a determining factor in organizational efficacy (Pfeffer, 1994).The most up-to-date definitions consider job involvement as the measure of the degree to which individuals see their professional activity as central, meaningful and important (Mortimer & Lorence, 1989), or even as the psychological identification with work (Lodahl & Kejner 1965;Lawler & Hall, 1970;Kanungo, 1982;Rabinowitz 1981).Diefendorff et al. (2002) were the first to be interested in the relationship between job involvement and OCB.On the whole, these early findings systematically display a positive correlation between job involvement and OCB (Cohen, 2006;Diefendorff et al., 2002).Thus: Hypothesis 3: Job involvement and OCB are positively related.

Participants
The participants were 355 working adults.The sample included 182 women and 173 men with a mean age of 30.6 (ranging from 21 to 60 years old) of age.The average professional experience is 7 years (ranging from 1 year to 37).

Measures
All measures employed in this research have been used on numerous occasions in the anglophone context.They have also been used a number of times in the francophone context.All our scales were subject to a process of double translation (from English to French and French to English) in order to maximize the psychometric properties of certain of our measurement scales.

OCB
Organizational citizenship behaviours were measured with scales developed by Podsakoff and MacKensie (1994) in the U.S. context and validated in French by Paillé (2007).A first scale (whose scores must be reversed during the data recording) measures sportsmanship (4 items), a second scale civic virtue (3 items) and a third helping behaviour (6 items).

Employee commitment
Three targets of commitment (affective commitment to one's supervisor, affective commitment to colleagues and affective commitment to the organization) were measured with scales developed and validated in French by Stinglhamber et al., (2002).

Job satisfaction
Job satisfaction was measured with the three-item scale of Hackman and Oldham (1975).These were validated in French by Paillé (2008).

Job involvement
Job involvement was measured with a selection of three items arising from the abbreviated scale of Lodhal and Kelner (1965), especially focused on relationships to work (Paillé, 2000).These three items were validated in French by Paillé (2000).
In addition, age and tenure were chosen as control variables because they can be linked to OCB (Organ & Ryan, 1995;Wagner & Rush, 2000).Finally, items were measured on a five point Likert-type scale, ranging from 1 (disagree completely) to 5 (agree completely).

Procedure
The goal of the present research is to 1) evaluate the factorial structure of citizenship in the workplace and 2) examine the relative contribution of a number of attitudes at work to variance in OCB forms.The following section describes the procedure employed to attain these two objectives.
Using confirmatory factor analysis, preliminary research on French employees (Paillé, 2007) provides results suggesting a four-factor structure (civic virtue, sportsmanship, helping and altruism).These first results represent a particularly useful benchmark.In the present research, the four-factor structure was evaluated with the Amos 5.0 program (Arbuckle, 2003).A number of statistical indices are used to examine the findings.The larger and more significant the value for the test of Chi-squared, the more the model differs from perfect adjustment.Other indices are also employed, including the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), whose expected value must ideally be less than .05(Schermelleh-Engel, Moosbrugger, & Müller, 2003); the Comparative Fit Index (CFI); the Good Fit Index (GFI); and the Adjusted Good Fit Index (AGFI).The rules concerning the threshold of acceptability for certain indices vary according to the source.Some researchers recommend values greater than .90(Medsker, Williams, & Holahan, 1994), while others set the threshold at .95 (Hu & Bentler, 1999).We choose to consider the adjustment acceptable if the values fall between .90 and .95.Finally the χ² /df ratio was also calculated.Values between 1 and 3 indicate a good fit.
Hierarchical regressions were performed to analyse relative contributions of attitudes to forms of OCB.In stage 1, age and professional experience were introduced as control variables.In stage 2, attitudes were introduced.

Results
The first stage was to evaluate the factorial structure discovered by Paillé (2007) for French employees.In the current research, we test this structure.The four-factor structure offers a good adjustment χ² (61) = 112, 58, p < .000,CFI = .934,GFI = .955,RMSEA = .049.Consistent with the present research's methodology, the four-factor model was compared to the most popular model on organizational citizenship behaviour in the literature.The goal was to confirm the eventual presence of nested models.
As the four-factor model, adjustment to the five-factor model was good (Table 1).Nonetheless, after an examination of the Chi-square difference (Bentler & Bonnett, 1980), the five-factor model offers no significant improvement over the four-factor model [∆χ 2 (1) = 3.36 ns].Bentler and Bonnett recommend ignoring an alternative model that provides no improvements in Chi-squared even if the values of the adjustment indices are greater.Therefore, the four-factor model is retained, rather than the five-factor one.In short, the initial findings of our research confirm those obtained previously by Paillé (2007).In summary, in the French cultural context, citizenship is structured in four dimensions: altruism, sportsmanship, civic virtue and helping others.
The means, standard deviations, internal consistencies and correlations are presented in Table 2. Internal consistencies are depicted on the diagonal.They were calculated with Cronbach's alpha.Nunally and Bernstein (1994) recommend values above .70.The alphas range from .66 (altruism) to .91 (affective commitment to one's supervisor).
Table 3 presents the results of hierarchical regression.The introduction of control variables at stage 1 shows that age and professional experience do not contribute to altruism (R² = .004),helping behaviour (R² = .006),civic virtue (R² = .003)and sportsmanship (R² = .009).
Hypothesis 1 is supported since the relationship between sportsmanship and job satisfaction is positive (β = .214,p < .005).

Discussion
The goals of this research were to evaluate the structure of organizational citizenship on French employees, and to study the possible role of a number if attitudes at work (for example, targets of commitment, job satisfaction and involvement at work) on dimensions of organizational citizenship.Our research findings serve to advance the literature on OCBs.First, the research provides data on OCBs in a still largely unexplored cultural context.Second, the research has examined possible associations between OCB and a number of attitudes at work (job satisfaction, job involvement and several targets of commitment).
The present research provides results that should contribute to the literature on citizenship in the French workplace.Until now, research with samples of French employees has been consistent with observations of US employees.Thus, Dagot and Vonthron (2003) and Paillé (2004) studied citizenship as a whole.More recently, Grima (2007) examined a three-factor model (helping behaviour, civic virtue and sportsmanship).These investigations did not follow common practices.(Paine & Organ, 2000;Lievens & Anseel, 2004) which suggest a thorough examination of the structure to verify any possible influence of cultural context.Such an examination was neglected in the research of Dagot and Vonthron, of Paillé and of Grima.There were two problems with this early research.First, the models used do not consider the cultural context's possible influence on citizenship structure.Secondly, such research data may overstate the correlation of forms of citizenship and the variables studied by French researchers.In this regard, the present research offers results allowing us to improve future research on French employees' citizenship behaviour, in particular.This research shows both divergences and convergences with the OCB literature.As in other cultural contexts, the items of civic virtue and sportsmanship respectively, are weakly correlated factors.This is consistent with US samples.On this point, French employees clearly reveal different dimensions related to civic virtue and sportsmanship.In addition the cultural context's influence is determinant for helping behaviour.Research in the US context shows the items of altruism, peacemaking and courtesy load the same factor interpreted as helping behaviour.For the two samples of the present research, the altruism items load a different factor while the four other items of helping behaviour load the same factor.This seems to suggest that French employees consider altruism as part of their work.Further research using the model developed by Hofstede (1984) could enhance our understanding of the impact of OCB dimensions observed in the French context.
One of the interesting contributions of this study is the analysis of empirical relationships between a number of attitudes at work and forms of organizational citizenship.While subtle distinctions are observed, on the whole, the data collected on French employees suggest results comparable to research in other cultural contexts.Job satisfaction is certainly the attitude at work that has been most extensively employed in research on determinants of OCBs.Based on the most common findings, we expected significant, positive correlations.On this point, our research offers comparable findings to earlier research (Yoon & Suh, 2003).Another contribution concerns the correlations between multiple targets of commitment and forms of citizenship.Our study confirms the propositions of a number of researchers (Becker, 1992;Becker et al. 1996) on the utility of multiplying the targets of commitment to study behaviour at work, and especially the study of organizational citizenship.In the conclusion of their article, Bishop et al. (2000) encourage future researchers to collect data allowing for greater exploration of the nature of relations between employees' targets of commitment and citizenship behaviour.Data collected on French employees suggest: 1) the influence of commitment to the colleagues on altruism, helping behaviour and civic virtue; 2) the influence of the commitment to the supervisor on sportsmanship; and 3) the influence of commitment to the organization on helping behaviour, civic virtue and sportsmanship.Another contribution of the research concerns analysis of the impact of involvement at work.As indicated earlier, while empirical research has recently explored the links between involvement at work and OCBs, the role of involvement at work is still relatively unknown.Previous research shows positive correlations or no correlations but never negative correlations.From this viewpoint, our findings are surprising.Indeed, the relationships are negative with regard to altruism and sportsmanship, positive for civic virtue and nonexistent for helping others.This is the first time that significant negative associations have been observed.Such findings may be related to the cultural context.
Our findings provide a practical benchmark, of use to managers working in firms established in France or those who are supervising French employees elsewhere in the world.As OCBs contribute to organizational efficiency (Organ et al., 2006), it is important to understand which attitudes of French employees towards work affect OCBs.Therefore, our research results offer valuable information for managers.
While making a number of contributions to the literature on organizational citizenship, there are also certain limitations to our research that cannot be ignored.First, we have chosen to treat the predictors in a similar fashion so as to determine their relative contribution.Certain of these predictors reflect a reaction related to the evaluation of the context (job satisfaction), while others are characteristic of a psychological state (involvement and targets of commitment).This could explain why job satisfaction remained inactive for most forms of organizational citizenship.Furthermore, our research was mainly focused on the citizenship model developed by Organ et al., with the findings partially conditioned by this choice.Perhaps a different model of citizenship, notably that developed by Graham (1991), would have led to different conclusions.Another limitation arises from our use of self-reported responses to measure citizenship.Nevertheless, we observe that the difficulties associated with data acquisition are perceived differently.Some researchers (e.g., Organ & Ryan, 1995) believe that this choice somewhat biases the results and they encourage the use of responses reported by a third party to avoid interference from the respondent's subjectivity.Others (e.g., Turnipsseed, 2002) believe the self-report is justified when the investigation is centred on examining links between psychological variables.The choice to collect data with self-reported measures may, nonetheless, result in a common variance bias likely to overestimate research findings (Spector, 1987).Finally, our results, as discussed, arise from a research design favouring a single measure.
In conclusion, this paper had two principal objectives.The first was to study the structure of organizational citizenship in the French workplace.An original four-factor structure was discovered.Secondly, there was the goal of analysing possible relations between attitudes and forms of organizational citizenship.Research reveals a positive impact of job satisfaction, commitment to the organization, commitment to the colleagues and commitment to the supervisor.At the same time, the research displays a negative impact of involvement at work.This study contributes to the literature on OCBs through exploring a previously neglected cultural context.While making a number of contributions to the literature on OCBs, further research is necessary to deepen our knowledge of OCB in the French context.Yoon, M. H., & Suh, J. (2003).Organizational citizenship behaviors and service quality as external effectiveness of contact employees.Journal of Business Research, 56, 597-611.

Hypothesis 2b :
Commitment to the colleagues and OCB are positively related Hypothesis 2c: Commitment to the supervisor and OCB are positively related

Table 3 .
Regression Results