Testing a theory of sense of community and community responsibility in organizations: an empirical assessment of predictive capacity on employee well-being and organizational citizenship
Summary (3 min read)
Introduction
- An empirical assessment of predictive capacity on employee well-being and organizational citizenship.
- The findings add new knowledge to the literature on the experience of community in organizations, as well as representing an important contribution to their understanding of the factors that drive employee action and well-being at work.
SOC and SOC-R in Organizations
- One theoretical model that has particular promise for application in organizational contexts is the community experience framework developed by Nowell and Boyd (2010, 2014).
- These a priori belief structures interact with specific aspects of a given setting and, in some cases, can evoke sentiments of duty and obligation for individuals as they seek to reconcile who they perceive they are in a given setting and their normative beliefs about what a person like them should do in such a setting.
- SOC, with its emphasis on community as a resource for meeting one’s needs, is hypothesized to be the stronger predictor of indicators related to psychological happiness and well-being.
- Conversely, Nowell and Boyd (2010) posit that SOC-R, with its emphasis on the desire to create psychological congruence between identity and behavior, will have a relatively stronger direct effect on engagement with a community relative to SOC.
- As Williams and Anderson (1991) note, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) can be directed toward individuals or the organization as a whole .
Testing SOC Versus SOC-R
- As noted earlier, one empirical study has been conducted to test the Nowell and Boyd (2010) community experience framework and the findings were consistent with the theoretical propositions of the model.
- The authors will attempt to replicate this finding by proposing the following hypothesis: H1: SOC will be a related but unique construct relative to SOC-R.
- Finally, the present study also seeks to expand upon existing research by testing mediation and moderation effects that are potentially present in the community experience framework (Nowell & Boyd, 2010).
- To resolve the dissonance, one can either fit one’s behavior to be in line with one’s attitudes or change one’s attitudes to be in line with one’s behavior.
- Therefore, the following exploratory hypotheses are proposed: H5a: The relationship between SOC-R and psychological well-being will be mediated by OCBs.
Sample and Procedures
- The study was conducted in a large healthcare system in the Eastern United States.
- A survey was administered to all employees via an e-mail, which was sent by a representative Journal of Community Psychology DOI: 10.1002/jcop of the human resources department.
- Driven by concerns over selection bias, the authors ran a series of comparative analyses aimed at investigating systematic differences in demographics between their respondent sample and the sample population.
- The authors are therefore confident that their resulting sample is representative of their sample population.
Measures
- The Brief Sense of Community Scale (BSCS; see Peterson, Speer, McMillan, 2008) measured SOC.
- A 7-point Likert-type response option format ranging from 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly disagree) was used for all items (e.g., “My organization helps me meet my goals”).
- The Organizational Citizenship Scale, developed by Williams and Anderson (1991), measured OCBs.
- The GHQ-12 is a self-report measure of psychological morbidity, intended to detect psychiatric disorders in community settings and nonpsychiatric Journal of Community Psychology DOI: 10.1002/jcop contexts.
Item and Factor Structure
- A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in IBM SPSS Amos (version 21) was conducted to validate the item structure for each of the measures, determine if factors were structurally unique, and rule out potential problems with common-method bias.
- They also note that these methods often cannot be completed because they require a linking procedure between the measures that can compromise anonymity.
- Moreover, the authors ran a statistical remedy for potential common-method bias.
- The CFA measurement model showed that items loaded significantly onto their respective factors (see Table 1) and an overall examination of indices showed acceptable model fit: root mean square error of approximation = .048, comparative fit index (CFI) = .912, incremental fit index (IFI) = .902.
- The findings revealed that items appropriately loaded on each of the measures and all factors were structurally unique.
RESULTS
- Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlations were analyzed for all major variables in the study and they are presented in Table 2.
- The analysis revealed that respondents reported above-average perceptions of both SOC and SOC-R.
- This finding suggests that the organization was perceived to fulfill specific needs of respondents, and that it represents a community setting for which employees Journal of Community Psychology DOI: 10.1002/jcop Note.
- CFA = confirmatory factor analysis; SE = standardized estimates; SE with CLF = SE with common latent factor; SOC = sense of community; SOC-R = sense of community responsibility; OCB = organizational citizenship behavior; OCBI = OCB directed toward individuals; OCBO = OCB directed toward organizations GHQ-12 = General Health Questionnaire.
- Significant estimate deviations from model without common latent factor are in bold (> .2).
Path Standardized estimate SE CR P
- Last, the authors examined the possibility of moderation of OCBs on the relationship between SOC-R and well-being (H5b).
- Results did not find evidence of significant moderation for either OCBOs or OCBIs.
- Therefore, OCBs did not moderate the relationship between SOC-R and psychological well-being.
DISCUSSION
- The validation of the community experience framework in a single organizational setting makes an important contribution to the literature in its efforts to understand the role of community in organizational settings.
- The relationship between feelings of community responsibility and Journal of Community Psychology DOI: 10.1002/jcop psychological well-being is mediated by taking action to enhance the community, thereby bringing cognitive identity and action into alignment.
- In addition, from an organizational perspective, these findings add an important construct to the field of management (Boyd & Nowell, 2014) and show managers that SOC and SOC-R are factors that are important in the milieu of organizational life.
- Thus, when organizations congruently stimulate employee responsibility values, employees will likely engage in OCBs.
Limitations
- Interpretation of the findings from this study must take into account a few possible limitations.
- In organizational field settings, which are important spaces for organizational research, it is uncommon for the researcher to have the ability to manipulate independent variables to ascertain direct effects on dependent variables.
- The present study was designed to investigate relationships and prediction in a field setting where experiences of community could naturally develop without intervention of the researcher.
- Second, the measures in the study were based on a single method of data collection.
- The authors implemented procedural remedies including counterbalancing the order of survey items and refinement of scale items.
Directions for Future Research
- The current research provides support for the idea that organizations are important community contexts.
- Where a person works is not the only community context of importance to them.
- Once that has been clearly established, a next step will be to understand how SOC and SOC-R act in relation to established constructs in the field of management.
Conclusion
- In conclusion, the psychology that serves as the bedrock of an individual’s SOC and SOCR for a community in an organizational context is new, yet it has significant theoretical and practical implications for organizational scholars and practicing managers.
- Moreover, this study provides an important contribution to advancing their understanding of the factors that drive members’ willingness to give of themselves toward collective aims in workplace contexts.
- Finally, the present study advances their understanding of the predictive capacities of SOC and SOC-R on important human and organizational outcomes.
- The study shows that they are likely distinct concepts which have separate etiologies and function in determining how members experience and engage in organizational settings.
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Citations
43 citations
Cites background or methods or result from "Testing a theory of sense of commun..."
...These findings are consistent with other recent empirical investigations (Boyd and Nowell 2017; Nowell and Boyd 2014), and add additional evidence that community experiences at work are important (Boyd 2014; Boyd and Angelique 2002, 2007)....
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...In addition to measuring PSM, based on this study and recent empirical investigations (Boyd and Nowell 2017; Boyd et al. 2018; Nowell and Boyd 2014; Nowell et al. 2016), assessing community experiences of prospective and current employees is becomingmore paramount....
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...In a subsequent study (Boyd and Nowell 2017) conducted in the context of a large non-profit health organization, they found a likewise consistent pattern....
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...Another one might argue that these outcomes occur when employees have a strong organizational sense of community and community responsibility (Boyd and Nowell 2017, 2014; Nowell and Boyd 2010, 2014; Nowell et al. 2016)....
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...…responsibility, and public service motivation Recent empirical work by Nowell and Boyd and colleagues (Nowell and Boyd 2014; Nowell et al. 2016); Boyd and Nowell 2017) has sought to investigate the nature and pattern of relationships between a sense of community (SOC), sense of…...
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29 citations
Cites background from "Testing a theory of sense of commun..."
...Boyd et al. (2018) went even further and introduced an additional concept on the public sector motivational constructs’ landscape: sense of community responsibility (SOCR)....
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...It is ‘native’ to public administration and management (Boyd et al. 2018), but it has also found application in other fields (Boyd and Nowell 2017; Nowell et al. 2016)....
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25 citations
18 citations
15 citations
Cites background from "Testing a theory of sense of commun..."
...Recent studies show that SOC especially correlates with psychological well-being measures, which in turn help stimulate further outcomes in institutional settings (Boyd, Nowell, Yang, & Hano, 2018; Boyd & Nowell, 2017, 2020; Nowell & Boyd, 2014)....
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References
52,531 citations
"Testing a theory of sense of commun..." refers methods in this paper
...However, we were able to implement other procedural remedies that Podsakoff et al. (2003) suggest, including counterbalancing question order and refining scale items (e.g., we used validated scales, concise item construction, avoided double barrels, and used different scale endpoints)....
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...However, we were able to implement other procedural remedies that Podsakoff et al. (2003) suggest, including counterbalancing question order and refining scale items (e....
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5,343 citations
"Testing a theory of sense of commun..." refers background or methods in this paper
...As Williams and Anderson (1991) note, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) can be directed toward individuals (OCBIs) or the organization as a whole (OCBOs)....
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...The Organizational Citizenship Scale, developed by Williams and Anderson (1991), measured OCBs....
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5,284 citations
"Testing a theory of sense of commun..." refers methods in this paper
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3,891 citations
3,197 citations
"Testing a theory of sense of commun..." refers background or result in this paper
...…& Carson, 2002; Price, 1977, 2001; Wright, & Bonett, 2007) and are somewhat related to employee performance (Baptiste, 2008; Bowling, 2007; Judge & Bono, 2001), the present findings show promise for future explorations into the relationship between SOC and important individual and…...
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...Moreover, the findings are consistent with Judge and his colleagues (Judge & Bono, 2001; Judge, Locke, Durham, & Kluger, 1998), who found that psychological perceptions of work were one of the primary causes of job satisfaction (one of the most common measures of employee well-being in the…...
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Frequently Asked Questions (2)
Q2. What are the future works in "Testing a theory of sense of community and community responsibility in organizations: an empirical assessment of predictive capacity on employee well-being and organizational citizenship" ?
With an eye to the future, the introduction and validation of the community experience framework to the workplace setting suggests several important directions for future research. Therefore, a future area of inquiry could evaluate how SOC and SOC-R vary across people nested within the same workplace and within individuals across organizational settings in which they are nested. The psychology behind where and how people identify the boundaries that define their perceived realms of community and responsibility is an interesting area for future research. Moreover, if SOC is a driver of psychological well-being, and responsibility is a driver of organizational citizenship behavior and engagement with these variables leading to outcomes like turnover, absenteeism, and performance, then future studies should explore how managers can design workplace settings to evoke a SOC and SOC-R perceptions.