Determinants of Organisational Citizenship Behaviour in a High Pay, High Job Security, Non-Western Organisational Context: A Case Study of Employees in the Saudi Arabia Public Sector

This study investigates the contextual and individual-level predictors of Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) among public sector employees in a hitherto little-researched non-Western context—that of Saudi Arabia. As well as being influenced by Arabic culture and Muslim (Sunnah) religious values, the Saudi public sector is characterised by a relational psychological contract involving both high pay and high job security. Consistent with models applied in prior research, we develop a model and set of hypotheses to examine the potential influence on OCB of prominent dispositional factors (personality traits and affectivity), key contextual factors (job security and pay level) and prominent attitudinal factors (job satisfaction, organisational commitment, trust, perceived fairness and intention to leave). We also examine attitudes as potential mediators of the relationship between dispositions and contextual factors and OCB. The research design was quantitative-led and uses data generated via survey method. Data were obtained from two large Saudi public service organisations—the Military Industries Corporation and Saudi Customs with total of 543 survey responses. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was selected as the method of analysis. Our findings indicate that four dispositional factors (conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism and negative affectivity) have a significance direct influence on OCB, while two attitudes (organisational commitment and intention to leave) mediate dispositional and contextual influence on OCB. However, most surprising and revealing, our results indicate that, job satisfaction has no significant association with OCB. Moreover, neither of our two key contextual factors—job security and pay level—are found to influence OCB directly.