Revealing the association of pharmacist's job satisfaction and organizational behavior citizenship in Taiwan

Ying-hsuan Chen^a , Tai-Chi. Wang^b , Frank F. C. Pan^c*

^aPharmacist; Department of Pharmacy, Tajen University, Taiwan.

^bProfessor; Department of Pharmacy, Tajen University, Taiwan.

^c*Associate Professor; Department of Hospitality Department, Tajen University, Taiwan. Corresponding author's email address: frankpan@tajen.edu.tw

Keywords:Job satisfaction, Organizational citizenship behavior, Pharmacist, Drug store, Healthcare professional

ARTICLE HISTORY: Received: 22-Jan-2018 , Accepted: 23-Apr-2018, Online available: 14-May-2018

Contribution/ Originality

The current study is the first exploring into the organizational citizenship behavior of pharmacist in Taiwan, in which the pharmacist's accreditation, education, and practicing were strictly regulated by law. The study helps healthcare institutes in formulating effective human resource management and development policy, of which implicitly advise a non-monetary oriented incentive program can be more effective. This study expands our knowledge on OCB by probing into healthcare professionals.

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. Organizational citizenship behavior

Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is a term describing the voluntary commitment and behavior that is not part of his or her contractual tasks (Smith et al., 1983). A plethora of research has proved that OCB helps organization's performances in many aspects and customer satisfaction (Podsakoff and MacKenzie, 1994; Nielsen et al., 2009; Podsakoff et al., 2009).

Job satisfaction is one of the major factors that drive and foster individual's OCB (Organ and Ryan, 1995). Studies of this kind are not limited to the manufacturing sector, but also in service sector (Chatman and Jehn, 1994).

Based on the studies on the motivational behavior of an organization (Katz, 1964), OCB is employee's discretionary behavior of personal choice that is not regulated by the job description and not directly rewarded by the organization's doctrines (Organ, 1988). OCBs contribute positively to overall organizational effectiveness.

OCB was first proposed as altruism and general compliance (Smith et al., 1983). A five-factor model (big five) consisting of altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, civic virtue, and sportsmanship was then introduced and deployed to measure and understand employee's OCBs (Organ, 1988).

Similar to general compliance, conscientiousness means employees accept and adhere to the rules, regulations, and procedures of the organization, and act well beyond the job requirements of the organization (Wang et al., 2005).

Civic virtue as an OCB dimension refers to the behaviors that the employee's deep concerns the life of the organization (Wang et al., 2005). It is therefore the employees may stand out to defend the organization's interests when an outside challenge emerge (Organ et al., 2006). Courtesy is a form of helping behavior or preventing work-related conflicts with others (Wang et al., 2005). Courteous behaviors are important in fostering a harmonious atmosphere and associated productive outcomes for the work place. Sportsmanship represents a willingness of accepting and following the context that not conforming to an ideal standard, so called "ability to roll with the punches" (Organ et al., 2006).

1.1.1. Antecedents

Unlike the earlier, current research generally agreed common antecedents of OCB are job satisfaction, perceptions of organizational justice, organizational commitment, personality characteristics, task characteristics, and leadership behavior at both the overall and individual OCB levels in the literature (Podsakoff et al., 1990).

Although multiple antecedents has been identified, such as perceived fairness, organizational commitment, and leader supportiveness (Organ and Ryan, 1995), leadership behaviors (Podsakoff, MacKenzie et al., 2000), as well as feedback, reutilization, and intrinsic satisfaction (Todd and Kent, 2006), job satisfaction remained the most intuitive antecedents of OCB (Organ and Ryan, 1995).

1.1.2. Consequences on organization

Consequences of OCBs are two-fold, one stream of impacts is for the organizational performance and success and managerial evaluations of performance and reward allocation, and the other is the impacts of OCB on the employees themselves.

Multiple studies and meta-analyses have shown positive relationship between OCBs and organizational performance and success. As described in Organ et al. (2006), civic virtue and sportsmanship were both significantly related to sales performance, helping behavior was significantly related to product quality, civic virtue and helping behavior were significantly related to team quota sales, helping behavior was significantly related to operating efficiency, customer satisfaction, and quality of performance, negatively correlated with wasted food, and overall OCB positively correlated with profits in a study covering multiple restaurants (Koys, 2001).

More recent studies has also found that the relationship between OCB and performance in unit level (Podsakoff et al., 2009) and group level (Nielsen et al., 2009), for individual dimension of civic virtue, sportsmanship, altruism, conscientiousness, and courtesy, and overall OCB (Nielsen et al., 2009).

1.1.3. The effects of OCB on employees

OCB means allowing employees to work outside their designated roles, and is thought to enhance the employee experience and lower turnover rate (Podsakoff et al., 2009; Nadiri and Tanova, 2010). However, these benefits appear with a cost of emotional exhaustion and home-work conflicts for conscientious employees (Deery et al., 2016).

Purpose of the current research is to examine the status of organizational citizenship behaviors as well as one of its antecedents, job satisfaction, among the population of pharmacist in Taiwan.

1.2. Job satisfaction

According to the service profit chain model (Heskett et al., 1994), employee's job satisfaction affects service quality, of which in turn result in customer satisfaction and company revenue. Literature assured that employee's job satisfaction is one of the important antecedents of OCBs, of which bring operational effectiveness.

Job satisfaction is a positive or pleasure feelings and emotional states that anchors employee performance, from which results in superior customer service (Dugguh and Dennis, 2014). Employee works with multiple expectations in varied dimensions, such as remuneration package, relationship with colleagues and supervisors, work environment, job achievement, and others. As the Valence - Instrumentality - Expectancy Model (VIE model) predicted (Vroom, 1964), job satisfaction arise when the employees experienced the valence higher than what they expected (Lu et al., 2005; Kreling et al., 2006).

1.3. Personal factors on job satisfaction and OCBs

The literature has shown a plenty of personal factors that can explain the variance of job satisfaction. These may include age, gender, marriage, education, remuneration, and other job -related factors.

Age

It is widely accepted that job satisfaction increases linearly with age (Lee and Wilbur, 1985; Clark et al., 1996). Empirical evidences had shown that a U-shaped relationship exists between age and job satisfaction (Clark et al., 1996), it declines from a moderate level in the beginning and later then increases steadily (Herzberg, 1966). Additional study has also indicated employee's age category can further moderate the relation between job satisfaction and perceived work alternatives (Pond and Geyer, 1991).

Gender

In general, women's jobs are worse than men's, yet women report higher levels of job satisfaction than do men (Clark, 1997). It seems a woman has lower job expectation than a man (Clark, 1997).

Although some recent study advocates that gender disparity in job satisfaction is significant in Asian, but not in Western countries (Singhapakdi et al., 2014), gender remains one of the significant factors that may differentiate the perception of job satisfaction. Some further argued that gender moderates the relationship between OCBs and personality (Beauregard, 2012), performance evaluation (Lovell, et al., 1999), turn over intention (Khalid et al., 2009) among others. It is apparent that gender has a role in differentiate a person's organizational commitment (Scandura and Lankau, 1997) and other constructs.

Marriage

Campbell et al. (1976) reported that single men are less job satisfied than married men, but that not for females. Spillover effects between marital satisfaction and job satisfaction either concurrent or mutually lagged are apparent (Heller and Watson, 2005). It is generally accepted that increases in marital satisfaction significantly lead to increases in job satisfaction (Rogers and May, 2003).

As a result, we conclude that personal factors may have certain influences on people's perceptions of job satisfaction and OCBs, as the hypothesis 1 (H1).

H1: Pharmacist's job satisfaction and OCB varied along with the personal factors.

Consequences of employee's job satisfaction

Consequences and effects of employee's job satisfaction are two-fold, one is for the organization and the other for the employee (Spector, 1997).

Job satisfaction positively affects the organization in multiple ways. It reduces turnover intention and behavior (Mobley, 1977; Nadiri and Tanova, 2010), increases employee's organizational commitment (Silva, 2006), and fosters organizational citizenship behavior (OCB, so-called good soldiers") (Bateman and Organ, 1983) among many others. This will then in turn result in organizational effectiveness (Koys, 2001).

Job satisfaction enhances the quality of life by a spill-over effects between work and family, promote marital satisfaction (Rogers and May, 2003; Heller and Watson, 2005), of which result in a harmony status of work-family relationship, and vice versa (Adams et al., 1996). Literature generally agreed that work-family conflict negatively affect the employee in three ways: work related, non-work related, and stress related (Allen et al., 2000).

Job satisfaction has been studies to reveal its impacts on the employee's organizational behavior (e.g., Bateman and Organ, 1983; Puffer, 1987; Organ and Konovsky, 1989), and found there are significant associations between job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior in the contexts of salespeople, hospital workers, non-academic and administrative jobs. Works for pharmacists are generally aligned with their professional training to deal with pharmaceutical affairs, yet the details of the work may be varied in response to the nature of the organization. Pharmacists work may pay more attention on customer sales and service for a job either as a pharmaceutical sales representative or a pharmaceutical advisor of a drugstore; and may pay more attention on the dispensing and patient education for a pharmacist in a clinic or hospital. Performance of a pharmacist and associated payment and promotion is largely depends on their interactions with leaders, colleagues, and customers (patients) of an organization. In other words, the pharmacists as healthcare professional perform their duties within an organization, and provide services to the customers on behalf of the organization, just like the salespeople or other workers in a university or a hospital. We therefore conclude that the factors affecting the pharmacist's job satisfaction will be the same as the others, and such job satisfaction will have positive relationship with their organizational citizenship behavior.

H2: Pharmacist's job satisfaction positively affects their organizational citizenship behaviors.

2. MATERIAL AND METHOD

2.1. Material

Object to study is the certified pharmacist who is currently working with an organization. 150 invitations were dispatched to the participants in an annual meeting of Taiwan Pharmacist Association in 2017, from which 105 valid responses (at a rate of 70%) received. The pharmacist association is a not-for-profit organization that was organized under the government regulation to include all pharmacist work in the designated area of a county government. We obtain the OCB scores from the supervisors or the drug store managers (Podsakoff et al., 1990).

Female and male are roughly equal in amount of response, and most of them are single. Most respondents are young at their late 20s, about one third of respondents are highly experienced pharmacist that aged 41 and above, as shown in table 1.

Table 1: Brief description of the respondents

2.2. Instrument

Organizational citizenship behavior is measured by a set of 22 questions that was developed based on Organ (1988) and Podsakoff et al. (1990). Cronbach's a for each dimensions are 0.875 for conscientiousness, 0.877 for altruism, 0.746 for civic virtue, 0.799 for courtesy, 0.845 for sportsmanship, and 0.912 for overall. The current study adopts the Pond and Geyer (1991) to measure the employee's job satisfaction.

2.3. Method

We conduct independent t-test to test the differences of each construct in terms of gender and marital status. As far as the age concerns, we categorized respondent's age into three groups, these are a group for less than 30, another for more than 40 years old, and a group for the rest that ages between 30 and 40.

A Pearson's correlation analysis is conducted to examine the relationships among all constructs of the research. Finally, we perform a regression analysis to understand how much of the job satisfaction explains the pharmacist's OCBs.

3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Test result shows that gender is less sensitive in identifying the differences of job satisfaction and OCBs among the pharmacist population. Some OCBS such as courtesy and sportsmanship are significant difference along with gender. This means male and female pharmacist may act significantly different in courtesy and sportsmanship, whereas female is more courtesy than male, and male behaves more like a sportsman than female, as shown in the summary report in table 2.

As proved by the literature and predicted by the current study, the marital status indeed bring influences to the job satisfaction as well as OCBs. The age as a variable appears the same as the marital status. Job satisfaction and OCBs are significantly difference along with the age. This means people in different age category will perceive job satisfaction in different levels. This also means people in varied age group may perform varied OCB levels as well. H1 is partially supported by the test results.

Table 2: Personal factors and job satisfaction and OCB

Gender: Male and female; marital: single and married (divorced and widowed are include in the single category; age: monthly income at 20,000or lower, 20,001~40,000, and 40,001or above. *p< .05,**p< .01,***p< .001

3.1. Correlation between job satisfaction and OCBs

A Pearson' correlation analysis is performed to examine the relationship among the constructs of the research. The test results indicate positive correlations between job satisfaction and all OCB dimensions, among which the altruism and civic virtue are the top two OCB dimensions that having strong correlation with coefficient of 0.54 and 0.35 respectively. Table 3 shows the details that the courtesy is the OCB dimension that modestly linked with job satisfaction.

Table 3: Correlation of job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior

p< .1, *p< .05, **p< .01, ***p< .001

The current research advances to test the effects of job satisfaction on the employee's OCB. As shown in the table 4, this research use job satisfaction to explain 43.7% of the variance of OCB (R2= .437). A plethora of studies has provided countless evidence to show that job satisfaction is the common root for employee's citizenship behavior. It is not surprising that the current research has the same outcome to support H2. As the single dependent variable, job satisfaction is a pretty strong predictor for OCBs (β=0.676). This means the pharmacist's job satisfaction can be such powerful can be used as a single predictor to understand the pharmacist good soldier behavior.

Table 4: Regression analysis of job satisfaction on OCB

DV: OCB; R= .661, R2= .437, Adj. R2= .435; F=213.07, df=1/104 N=105

4. CONCLUSION AND MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS

Pharmacist's job satisfaction has direct effects on organizational citizenship behavior, among which general compliance was the most affected, followed by altruism, civic virtue, sportsmanship, and courtesy. Drugstore or pharmacy is highly regulated by the government with comprehensive safety guidelines that requires careful and continuous monitoring and or auditing. Drugstore or pharmacist that violating the regulation may leads to a revocation of pharmacy and pharmacist.

It is important for the pharmacists to strictly adhere to the pharmacy regulation. Levels of job satisfaction have significant impact on the pharmacist's general compliance behavior, of which in turn result in a regulation compliance behavior. Unlike other retailers, drug stores basically allow zero tolerance, management of a pharmacy should make every efforts in create an agreeable work environment to foster the pharmacist's job satisfaction and then to link this with the pharmacist's OCBs. Doing this may not only help preventing drug hazard, protecting the patient's safety, but also improving the quality of customer relationship.

Like colleagues in other disciplines of healthcare industry, pharmacists are generally paid with a higher level than those in other industries. Incentive programs that are used to motivate salespeople in general businesses mainly with monetary prizes may not work for the pharmacists. It is suggested for the shop managers remain alert to understand exactly what the pharmacist's needs, from which to formulate proper fringe benefit packages as specific as possible for each individual pharmacist. An optional menu allowing the pharmacist to design a benefit program on their own would be a smart measure.

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