Cross-culture study on the motivational mechanism of hotel employees' organizational citizenship behavior

Abstract

Scope and Method of Study: The purpose of the study was to understand the motivational mechanism of hotel employees' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) from a cross-culture perspective. This study proposed a new three-dimensional model of OCB (OCB-O, OCB-I and OCB-C) as well as the altruistic-egoistic motivational mechanism of OCB. This study empirically tested the proposed model by collecting data from both US hotel employees and Chinese hotel employees using convenience sampling method. Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Structural Equation Modeling and Multi-group Structural Equation Modeling were the main statistical methods used for data analysis.

Findings and Conclusions: The findings suggested that hotel employees' OCB was complexly motivated by both altruistic motivations and egoistic motivations and the motivations of OCB seemed to be culturally specific. In addition, this study developed a new three-dimensional framework of OCB, using Organization (OCB-O), Coworker (OCB-I) and Customer (OCB-C) as the targets of OCB to distinguish the three dimensions. The findings suggested that this new framework was a valid framework. This study also expanded the traditional Social Exchange Theory by including coworker exchange and customer-employee exchanges. It also tested four moderators' (culture, individualism-collectivism orientation, impression management and empowerment) influence on the proposed relationships. The study could contribute to the existing literature on the dimensionality of OCB as well as the motivational mechanism of OCB. It enriched the existing literature by investigating OCB in the hotel contexts. The implications drawn from the findings also could help hotel managers to motivate employees to provide good services to customers as well as retaining hotel employees to stay with the current organization.