Job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) : Does team commitment make a difference in self‐directed teams?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a model in which team commitment in self‐directed teams moderates the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Design/methodology/approach – Survey questionnaires measuring team commitment, OCB, and job satisfaction were administered to 242 full‐time employees who were involved in self‐directed teams at three geographically diverse manufacturing facilities. After carefully testing the psychometric properties of the scales, hierarchical multiple regression was used to test hypotheses. Findings – The relationship between job satisfaction and OCB was shown to be significant, as was the relationship between team commitment and OCB. Most importantly, the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior was moderated by team commitment, such that the relationship was stronger when team commitment was high. Research limitations/implications – Due to heightened salience of self‐directed team functioning in our sample, generalization of results may be limited. Practical implications – The findings indicate that the usefulness of self‐directed work teams may be limited in situations where employees lack team commitment. Besides implementing self‐directed teams and assigning performance goals, researchers and practitioners need to identify efforts that work toward increasing commitment of team members, thereby increasing organizational citizenship behavior in the organization. Originality/value – It is believed that this research makes a significant contribution to understanding the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior, a relationship that has long been known but not well defined. Moreover, the paper develops what appears to be a valid and reliable measure of team commitment, based on goodness of fit using cross‐validation, confirmatory factor analysis, and reliability tests.