How can we sustain a competitive advantage? Is one the questions constantly discussed among the leadership of any organisation because of its impact on the performance of organisations. Gradually, leaders have come to realise that the key to gaining a sustainable competitive advantage rests almost entirely with employees. Highly motivated employees provide sustainable competitive advantage through a combination of positive in-role and extra-role activities. The discretionary extra-role activities are the key to improved organisational performance, as organisations that rely solely on in-role activities will not be able to adapt fast enough to the constantly changing business environment.
Organisational citizenship behaviors have been identified as one of the extra-role behaviors, capable of harnessing the total capabilities of an organisation’s members. Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) is either a reactive or a proactive behavior. It is reactive when it is the result of a favorable organisational climate that encourages individuals to go outside their prescribed in-role activities to the benefit of the organisation or an individual; OCB is described as proactive when employees perceive their extra-role activities as an investment which will be noticed overtime and they will be rewarded accordingly. Hence the need to understand and identify how OCB is enacted in various business contexts and cultures. A major assumption of past cross-cultural studies is that one scale developed in one culture is usable across all cultures. It is empirically impossible to determine if the assumption that a scale developed outside will adequately capture the effects of OCB as a local scale would. Dr Okechukwu Amah, intended to fill this gap in a recent study entitled “Organisational Citizenship Behaviour Across Cultures: Are Organisational Cititzenship Behaviour Scales Transferable Across Cultures?
The study administered a newly developed Organisational Citizenship-Individual, Organisational citizenship-Organisation and Dutifulness scale alongside with the already developed and validated Organisational citizenship -Organisation and Organisational citizenship individual scale to the same set of participants to ascertain the effectiveness of each scale in predicting work outcomes, as discussed above to ascertain that using one scale will be insufficient in determining if a scale developed outside Nigeria will sufficiently capture the effects as a local scale would.
The results from the study, demonstrated that locally developed OCB scales are better in measuring the level of organisational citizenship behavior achieved within a local community. Hence using foreign OCB scales will underestimate the OCB enactment within the Nigerian culture and give false impressions on both individual and organisational outcomes. The findings from this study were published in Research Journal of Business Management
Organisational citizenship behaviors have been identified as one of the extra-role behaviors, capable of harnessing the total capabilities of an organisation’s members. Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB)
