This paper investigates the effects of employment status on the organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and customer orientation of the hotel employees. Based on the social exchange theory and norm of reciprocity. this paper suggests that full-tim...
This paper investigates the effects of employment status on the organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and customer orientation of the hotel employees. Based on the social exchange theory and norm of reciprocity. this paper suggests that full-time employees exhibit more organizational citizenship behaviors and customer-oriented behaviors than contingent workers. In addition. this paper proposes that there are positive relationships between OCBs and customer orientation. and those relationships are positively moderated by employee's psychological empowerment. To test the hypotheses proposed. data were collected from a sample of customer-contact employees working for 7 luxury hotels in Busan and Jeiu City. Questionnaires were carried out in 8 hotels, and 306 out of 390 Questionnaires were returned from 7 hotels. After excluding 26 unusable cases which had unacceptable level of missing data. 280 cases were used for analysis. Employment status was categorized as either regular or contingent employees based on the respondents' self-report. This paper measured five dimensions of organizational citizenship behaviors with 20 items taken from Podsakoff et al. (1990), After eliminating items which were detrimental to the reliability and validity of scales. an exploratory factor analysis finally generated three factors: altruism. civic virtue and sportsmanship. Customer orientation was conceptualized as an employee's behavioral tendency or predisposition to satisfy customer needs and measured with 4 items taken from Saxe and Weitz's (1982) SOCO scale. Empowerment was focused on the self-determination and defined as the employees' degree of discretion and autonomy to make work-related decisions and measured with 4 items taken from Spreitzer (1995) and Gonzalez and Garazo (2006). Four demographic variables. which may influence the employees' attitudes and behaviors. were controlled for in the statistical analysis to reduce the possibility of spurious relationships: gender. age. position (managers vs. nonrnanagers). and length of service. Results in this study did not support the expectations of social exchange theory that regular employees would exhibit more OCBs and customer-oriented behaviors than contingent workers. Instead of employment status. demographic variables such as managerial position and length of service had significant impacts on the employees' behaviors. Since social exchange theory has a limitation as such. alternative perspectives should be developed to explain these unexpected results. One plausible explanation is that group pressure is important to shape the employees' behaviors. As Pearce (1993) suggests. when people join a team. they face social pressures to conform to group norms and expectations regardless of employment status. Since contingent workers also don't want to face social ostracism at work, they are likely to exhibit the behaviors which are required them to do. Secondly. employees' OCBs and customer-oriented behaviors may be viewed not as a response to the rewards and benefits they receive on the basis of employment status but as a result of the personal value acquired through the socialization processes (Bell & Menguc, 2002). For example. once a person learns and internalizes altruistic values and behaviors through the socialization processes inside and outside of the organization. he (or she) will be inclined to perform helping behaviors on the basis of behavioral consistency regardless of employment status. Thirdly. OCBs can be recognized not as selfless and prosocial behaviors but as self-serving and impression-enhancing behaviors (Boline. 1999). Therefore. even contingent workers have a strong tendency to engage in OCBs for the purpose of enhancing their images at work and extending their employment contracts. Next. the results supported the hypotheses that OCBs are positively related to customer orientation. Two out of three OCB factors. altruism and civic virtue. are significantly related to