The organizational citizenship behavior of IS personnel: Does organizational justice matter?

Abstract

In developing a successful IS development project today, good IS personnel are crucial. However, just achieving and maintaining their skills is not sufficient; they must contribute to the project in a meaningful fashion, including their supportive activity: organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). However, IS personnel have different motivational factors, informal behavior patterns, and exhibit OCBs different from those in other fields. In addition, projects present a different face than operations in an organization and alter the context of OCBs. This combination leads to a unique setting where the perceptions of equity by IS employees in project teams are unlikely to follow patterns established for functional operations. To determine if perceived equity can lead to desirable attitudes and behavior in this novel setting, we surveyed IS team members of development projects. Data from 298 respondents in 47 project teams indicated that equity, as measured by perceptions of justice, add to job commitment, which serves as a mediator between the justices and OCBs. Project leaders of teams with IS personnel must therefore work to improve the perception of equity in the distribution of rewards and treatment.

Introduction

The boundary spanning nature of an IS project requires the presence of both explicitly recognized behaviors and extra-role behaviors to complete the project successfully. The extra-role behaviors or organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) have been recognized throughout the management literature as crucial for organizational success, especially when there is mutual dependence among employees required to accomplish a defined task such as in an IS development project. OCBs include beneficial actions that help prevent problems, identify and complete activities not fully specified, assist other team members, identify flawed practices, and participate in political processes. Such activities are rarely explicitly stated, required, or rewarded, but are still essential for those working in jobs that span organizational boundaries, require resourcefulness, and suffer from extensive ambiguity. Focusing specifically on IS personnel is essential because research has shown that IS workers are motivated and behave differently, and have different expectations than workers in other fields [2], [6], [8].

Much effort has been devoted to studying explicitly defined in-role behaviors for IS personnel, such as remaining with the job and dependably carrying out assigned tasks in job requirements, but personnel policies and practices resulting in OCBs have not been well studied [14]. Given their importance in IS project success and the differences of IS personnel from the employee body at large, it seemed essential to develop an understanding of how to improve OCBs of IS personnel working on IS projects. Studies in other disciplines provide ways to do this. A relationship between perceived organizational justice (one's perception of fair treatment by the organization and its managers) and work commitment has been studied in the human management literature [9]. Though such studies have been directed at organizations rather than projects, they concluded that different forms of organizational justice have different impacts on work commitment and OCBs. The different forms of justice have included distributive, procedural, and interactive justice. Further, job commitment (the perspective that one's job is central to one's life) has been found to affect behaviors and to be a key factor in activating IS employee motivation [1]. Thus, organizational justice and IS worker's job commitment serve as potential motivators in developing effective OCBs.

This leads us to make a study with the objective of determining practices that will encourage the development and exhibition of OCBs among IS personnel; the specific research questions were:

• Does job commitment motivate IS personnel to practice effective citizenship behavior?

• Do the organizational justices promoted by an organization help improve job commitment and increase OCBs?

• Which forms of organizational justice appear to promote organizational citizenship behavior and does job commitment act as a mediator in such relationships?

• IS project managers could utilize the answers to build a productive environment based around the justices found to be most important.