The Role of Leadership Styles in Organizational Citizenship Behavior through the Mediation of Perceived organizational Support and Job satisfaction.
| Autor | Asgari, Ali |
Introduction
All organizations, including higher education organizations, are trying to compete in today's challenging and changing world to meet their goals of recruiting staff to work beyond their job requirements. Daily increase of contribution of employees to value creation in a dynamic competitive business system has led to a change in the look of managers to employees from a single source of production to an organizational citizen (Jafari & Majidi-Moghadam, 2013). Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) includes employee voluntary behaviors that are not part of their formal duties and are not directly considered by the formal organizational reward system, although they increase the overall effectiveness of the organization (Organ, 1988).
This term was first used by Organ in 1988, who included five aspects as part of such phenomenon: (i) altruism (voluntary contributions to others, sacrifice, peace, hope and morale, and prevention of work-related events); (ii) conscientiousness (behaviors that guide a person in performing their duties above the expected level, such as punctuality in performing tasks); (iii) sportsmanship (tolerating complications and inevitable problems of work without objection); (iv) civic virtue (responsible partnership and commitment to the life of the organization); and (v) courtesy (polite behaviors that prevent workplace problems, such as helping others to prevent problems or action to reduce others' problems) (Podsakoff, Mackenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, 2000).
Organizations are not able to develop their effectiveness without the willingness of volunteers to collaborate. Employees with an OCB act beyond their duty and express their efforts, energy, and insight to flourish their abilities for the benefit of the organization. In this case, employees usually pass on their personal interests and prioritize their responsibilities in the interests of others. Accordingly, OCB has positive outcomes, such as increased productivity, better performance, greater effectiveness (Ahangari, Hajinejad, & Khanmohammadi, 2017; Kilinc & Ulusoy, 2014), positive relationships between employees, greater efficiency in resource allocation, and reduced maintenance costs, thus providing the flexibility needed to innovate and improve customer service (Sanaatjoo & Mahmoudi, 2015). Besides, good corporate citizens enable the organization to efficiently utilize scarce resources and improve and enhance the ability of colleagues and managers to do their jobs. Organizations that promote citizenship behavior are attractive places to work and will be able to recruit and retain the best people, as well as gain organizational trust and customer satisfaction (Bahari-far, Javaherikamel, & Ahmadi, 2011).
Higher educational institutions are organizations where OCB is a necessity if the institutions are to survive (Eyupoglu, 2016). In addition, OCB helps organizations to be successful in the unpredictable contemporary environment and accelerates novelty and creative approaches. Higher educational organizations are encouraged to make every feasible endeavor to develop, maintain and preserve a favorable work climate that fosters citizenship behavior among the employees. It is necessary for higher educational institutions to adopt and encourage OCBs so as to generate a better working environment and to enhance work performance (Waheed & Ahmad-Shah, 2017). When staff display organizational citizenship behavior, their level of commitment will improve, and the performance of higher education institutions will improve as well. Therefore, these institutions will be able to meet their targeted goals and serve the community better (Saheed-Adewale, Ghavifekr, & Megat, 2018).
Given the positive implications of OCBS, recognizing the predictors of these behaviors is of great importance to organizations. In this regard, a number of variables have been studied in the studies as predictors of OCB. According to the results of these studies, variables such as leadership styles (Lian & Tui, 2012), organizational trust (Zhang, Zhao, & Fang, 2010), job satisfaction (Swaminathan & Jawahar, 2013), organizational commitment (Ibrahim & Aslinda, 2013), and organizational justice (Di-Fabio & Palazzeschi, 2012) can provide a basis for the development and strengthening of OCB. Among these, one of the challenging variables is leadership style, which is defined as techniques used to influence and direct the activities of others (Rezaei, Yarmohammadian, & Mahmoodzadeh-Ardakani, 2017).
In the past, organizations were working in steady environments, so they needed less change; however, they are now competing in dynamic environments (Moradi, Jafari, Omidi, & Alidost, Ghahfarokhi, 2014). In the newest division of leadership styles, leaders use two sets of different behaviors, including transformational and transactional leadership, to influence their followers (Nasiri-Valikbani & Emadi-Pashakalai , 2016).
Transformational leadership is a complex and dynamic process that tries to create an emotional relationship with its followers, in which the leaders affect their values, beliefs, and goals. Leaders penetrate on beliefs, values, and goals, and have an extraordinary effect on their followers (Saki, Dasti, & Nasri, 2015). Transformational leadership, with an emphasis on the development of followers, encourage them to self-fulfillment and endeavor to fulfill their obligations beyond expectations (Asgari, Silong, Ahmad, & Abu-Sama, 2008). These leaders have a clear vision of the future, focusing on changing their employees' attitudes and assumptions toward mission and organizational goals and encourage their employees with values such as friendship, honesty and responsibility to look at the interests of the organization beyond their own interests (Arefi, Rashid, & Abochenari, 2012). The leader that transforms employees is constantly trying to inject this thought into their followers, so that they possess superior powers and abilities and not only have to deal with current issues but also look at things from a new perspective. In addition, transformational leadership encourages organizational learning and provides policy for critical periods (Shadraconis, 2013), and it is effective in promoting and improving organizational effectiveness (Ling & Ling, 2012). With increasing levels of skills, capabilities, commitment of employees through transformational leadership, and increased job satisfaction (Nasiri-Valikbani & Emadi-Pashakalai, 2016), employees are more likely to work than their usual duties and function beyond the organization's expectations (Bahadori & Nayeri, 2017).
Transactional leadership is also a kind of leadership that follows the leader-member exchange theory. Therefore, as a social exchange process, leaders under this approach rely on rewards and organizational punishments to increase the performance of their employees (Zhang, Tsui, & Wang, 2013). In this process, leaders have in their dealings with their followers a contractual relationship or trademark, so that employees receive tangible rewards for higher performance and improved performance of tasks. On the contrary, if they do not observe the rules and regulations or if they fail to meet the standards in accordance with the standards, they will be punished (Gholamzadeh, Haghshenase, & Mohammadkhani, 2015). Based on this, transactional leadership promotes followers by focusing their attention on their personal and interactive interests (Zhang et al., 2013). However, the main limitation of transactional leadership is that among employees it does not result in longterm commitment to organization.
While transformational leadership leads followers to act in accordance with their expectations, it also prompts them to go beyond what is expected (Nasiri-Valikbani & Emadi-Pashakalai, 2016). In their study, Asgari et al. (2008) showed that transformational leadership has more predictive power in developing organizational citizenship behavior compared to transactional leadership. Additionally, Moradi, Hamidi, Sajjadi, Jafari, and Moradi (2011) identified a positive and significant relationship between transformational and transactional leadership and OCB, with transformational leadership being a stronger predictor of OCB. In contrast, Ngunia, Sleegers and Denessen (2008) showed that transformational leadership does not have a significant relationship.
In regard to the differences between transformational and transactional leadership and the contradictory results of the studies above, this work seeks to determine whether transformational leadership will be more likely to lead to OCB than a transactional leadership style. In any case, transformational and transactional leadership play a different role as one of the leading methods for predicting OCB and developing an OCB model. Although the question of whether this effect is direct or indirect remains on the stage. Given the consequences of transformational and transactional leadership, employees seems to be affected by perceived organizational support and job satisfaction, possibly affecting the OCB studied in the model.
Based on Burns' theory of transformational leadership (1978), transformational leaders show active behaviors that include providing a shared responsibility, seeking change, working with employees, focusing on the inner needs of high-level employees, and helping to create higher job satisfaction, higher motivation and higher employee sense. Conversely, exchange leaders are passive and only seek to maintain the status quo, with attention focused on the lowest level of employees' needs, their look at work, finding errors and deviations in work and exercising punishment in order to increase positive attitude and achieve higher levels of success. This type of leader uses extrinsic motivators and tangible rewards for encouraging their collaborators and use contingency punishment to make them follow orders (Eskandari, 2015). These...
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