Employment status and employee service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviour : The mediating roles of internal mobility opportunity and job insecurity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of employment status on service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of customer contact employees. The authors also investigate the mediating roles of internal mobility opportunity and job insecurity in the relationship between employment status and service-oriented OCB. Design/methodology/approach – A survey methodology was used and data were collected from a dyad-sample of 270 employees and their supervisors of one retail and one banking companies in Taiwan. Product-of-coefficients approach and bootstrapping were used to test the multiple mediating model. Findings – The results demonstrate that temporary employment related negatively to service-oriented OCB. Moreover, both internal mobility opportunity and job insecurity mediated the employment status – service-oriented OCB linkage. Research limitations/implications – This study has three limitations. First, this study examined only fixed-term direct-hire temporary employees. Future research should explore voluntary job behaviors of different categories of temporary employment to confirm the results of the present study. Second, this study examined internal mobility opportunity and job insecurity as two mediators. Other alternative avenues may exist by which employment status may lead to service-oriented OCB. Future research may explore additional possible mediators. Finally, the participants of this study were selected by the human resource departments of the participating companies. This option could have introduced selection bias in this study. Practical implications – This study suggests that management should be aware of why temporary customer contact employees have lower levels of service-oriented OCB. As service-oriented OCB may be vital for organizational success in the service context, management must consider the benefits and costs when hiring temporary employees. Moreover, management can motivate temporary employees to display higher service-oriented OCB by shaping their expectations of internal mobility possibilities, or reducing temporary employees’ perception of job insecurity to enhance their service-oriented OCB. Originality/value – This study makes two contributions. First, this study extends the effect of employment status in the OCB literature by investigating the relationship between employment status and service-oriented OCB for customer contact employees. The results of the present study lend support for the partial exclusion theory to predict that socially excluded group (i.e. temporary employees) tends to be less engaged in service-oriented OCB. Second, this study contributes to the literature by investigating two important links (i.e. internal mobility opportunity and job insecurity) to explain why temporary employment may lead to lower service-oriented OCB.