Impetus for action: a cultural analysis of justice and organizational citizenship behavior in Chinese society

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Sept, 1997  by Jiing-Lih Farh,  P. Christopher Earley,  Shu-Chi Lin

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For both cultural dimensions, we hypothesize a basic relationship between justice and citizenship behavior predicated on an instrumental relationship. People who are more traditional, or less modern, have expressive (covenantal) relationships with their organizations based on societal expectations of roles. These relationships are an alternative to organizational justice as a means of encouraging employees to engage in citizenship behavior. Not only may citizenship behavior, as a construct, differ across cultural boundaries, its relationship to other constructs such as organizational justice may change as well.

To focus on traditionality and modernity, we conducted our study in a Chinese setting, Taiwan. Certainly while one

might question to what extent Taiwanese society represents traditional versus modern values, because tremendous economic growth has occurred in the past two decades, as have cultural shifts (Yang, Yu, and Yeh, 1989), there is evidence that these values generally hold sway and may even dominate a particular demographic segment within Taiwanese society-women (see Bond and Hwang, 1987, for a review). Some researchers maintain that the traditional role of women remains an unchanging core value in Taiwanese society (Chiang, 1982), and, therefore, we expect that Chinese women will view their relationships to their companies pre-dominantly through expressive ties, whereas men will tend to view them instrumentally.

Gender is not simply a proxy for traditionality or modernity. Research on individual differences in justice behavior has demonstrated that the equity norm is more salient for men than women (Major and Deaux, 1982). Brockner and Adsit (1986) showed that the equity-satisfaction relationship was considerably more pronounced for men than for women and was even stronger for men in a primarily male group and weaker for women in an all-female group. Chang (1988) demonstrated gender effects on individual performance under different reward distribution systems. Male Taiwanese students were found to produce more under an equity-based reward system than under an equality-based one, whereas female students' productivity did not differ under the two types of reward systems on certain tasks. To explore the effect of gender, we hypothesize that gender will significantly moderate the effects of justice on citizenship behavior:

Hypothesis 2: Gender will moderate the relationship between organizational justice (distributive and procedural) and citizenship behavior. For male Chinese employees, the relationship between organizational justice and citizenship behavior will be stronger than for female Chinese employees.

We conducted two studies of citizenship behavior and justice in Taiwan. In the first study we developed and assessed a citizenship behavior measure. Our second study was a field investigation of the relationship between citizenship behavior and organizational justice.

STUDY 1

We used three independent samples (two in Study 1 and a third in Study 2) to develop the Chinese Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) scale. The first sample in Study 1 consisted of 109 Chinese students and employees enrolled in the Master's of Business Administration (MBA) or Management Development programs at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Sixty percent of the respondents had more than five years of full-time work experience, and 41 percent were managers.