RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONAL CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIORS AND JOB SATISFACTION IN PORTUGUESE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Organizational citizenship behaviors describe actions in which employees are willing to go above and beyond their prescribed role requirements. Prior theory suggests and some research supports the belief that these behaviors are correlated with indicators of organizational effectiveness. Studies have yet to explore whether relationships between organizational citizenship behaviors and organizational effectiveness are generalizable to non-U.S. samples. The present study examined relationships between organizational citizenship behaviors and one indicator of organizational effectiveness – job satisfaction – for Public Administration in Portugal. A total of 129 employees were selected as participants in the study. The sample of employees were not equally split between males (27,9%) and females (72,1%), aged between 23 and 65, with an average value of 38,97 years. The employees were from two public institutions belonging to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, located in Lisbon, in Portugal. The evaluation plan used also included collected data of socio-demographic identification, the Job Satisfaction at Work Multi-Factorial Scale (Ferreira, Diogo, Ferreira & Valente, 2006) for the assessment of job satisfaction and the Measuring Instrument for Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (Rego, 2000) for assessment of organizational citizenship behaviours. The first measure assesses four dimensions of job satisfaction: work organization motivation, motivation for achievement and power, performance motivation and motivation associated with involvement, and the second measure assesses five dimensions of organizational citizenship behaviors including altruism, courtesy, civic virtue, sportsmanship and generalized conformity. The results supported a relationship between the OCB dimension and the job satisfaction. Based on these results we also intend to translate the data from the empirical research on lines of action more sensitive to the major difficulties perceived by employees, as well as to pave the way for further research in this field.