AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE IMPACT OF SDB ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OCB AND INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE Barbara J. Allison, Louisiana Tech University Richard Steven Voss ' University of Alabama C. Richard Huston, Louisiana Tech University ABSTRACT The impact of social-desirability response bias (SDB) on the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior (0CB) and two measures of student performance (productivity, cumulative GPA) is explored. Hierarchical regression analysis demonstrates that various dimensions of OCB have a significant, positive effect on productivity and cumulative GPA, when controlling for SDB. INTRODUCTION According to Fisher (1993) and Mick (1996), social-desirability response bias (SDB) should be controlled for in both "dark-side" (e.g., employee theft) and "light-side" (e.g., philanthropic activity) research. Of relevance to the marketing literature in particular, a recent issue of Marketing & Psychology (February 2000) was devoted to emphasizing the need for and virtues of addressing the SD13 phenomenon specifically within marketing research. Prosocial behaviors, a broader concept encompassing the construct of organizational citizenship behavior (cf. Van Dyne, Cummings, and McLean Parks 1995), was among those constructs for which Mick (1996) explicitly recommended SDB be controlled. According to Neterneyer, Boles, McKee, and McMurrian (1997), [Organizational citizenship behaviors] represent behaviors above and beyond those formally prescribed by an organizational role, are discretionary in nature, are not directly or explicitly rewarded within the context of the organization's formal reward structure, and are important for the effective and successful functioning of an organization (p. 86). A review of the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) literature as a whole indicates that very few researchers have even indirectly addressed the issue of SDB. An exception includes the work of Morrison (1994) who indicated that SDB might be managed by changing the wording of the OCB scale employed such that normatively laden responses were less likely. However, Morrison's work was presented within an organizational behavior context. Within a marketing context, it would appear that researchers have yet to adequately account for the potential confounds of SDB on variables of inquiry in general (cf. Fisher 2000), to include OCB.

OCB has been the subject of increased attention within the marketing field over the last several years. For instance, the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior and subjective performance appraisals has been the subject of recent inquiry in the marketing domain (e.g., MacKenzie, Podsakoff, and Fetter 1991; 1993; MacKenzie, Podsakoff, and Paine 1999; Podsakoff and MacKenzie 1994). Marketing researchers have also begun to focus their attention on determining the impact of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) on organizational, or unit, and individual performance (e.g., Podsakoff and MacKenzie 1994). In an initial attempt to provide insight into the relationship between OCB and performance at the unit level (i.e., sales agency), Podsakoff and MacKenzie (1994) found evidence of a negative relationship between individual performance and a dimension of OCB, namely altruism. However, given the nature of their method of data collection, this association could not be confirmed. In response to their initial yet unconfirmed insights, Podsakoff and MacKenzie (1994) called for the investigation of the manner in which the exercise of OCB impacts the performance of both the source (the individual engaging in the behavior) and target (the immediate benefactor of the behavior). For instance, does OCB enactment cause a fall in source productivity that is then offset by an increase in target productivity? The present investigation will address some unanswered questions regarding the relationship between OCB and actual (i.e., objective) individual performance. The emphasis here, however, will be on only one side of the performance equation advanced by Podsakoff and MacKenzie (1994)-the performance of the source. The purpose of the present research is therefore twofold. First, hypotheses regarding the directional (positive or negative) relationships among five primary dimensions (altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, and civic virtue) and one second-order latent dimension (helping behavior) of OCB and the performance of those individuals engaged in the behavior are outlined and empirically evaluated. Second, the issues raised by Fisher (2000) regarding the need to better understand and more thoroughly investigate the role of SDB as it relates to marketing-based research is addressed. This is accomplished by controlling for SDB in assessing the relationships among the various dimensions of OCB and individual performance. SOCIAL-DESIRABILITY RESPONSE BIAS Social-desirability response bias (SDB) has been characterized as a source of systematic error that emanates from research subjects responding to scale items in a manner they believe will present them in a favorable light (Paulhus 1991). The effects of SDB were first addressed with a significant degree of methodological rigor in the early 1960s by Crowne and Marlowe (1960) with their introduction of the "Marlowe-Crowne" SDB scale. The MarloweCrowne scale assesses the degree to which subjects engage in desirable but uncommon behaviors and undesirable but common behaviors. Working within a consumer behavior context, Mick (1996) determined that the effects of SDB on the relationships among predictor and criterion variables should be controlled for empirically even if they are nominal or nonexistent, because they can confound research results. Mick (1996) recommended that this be accomplished by comparing the simple (zero-order) correlation between the independent and dependent variable at issue with the partial correlation that results from holding SDB constant. Fisher (1993) also demonstrated the propensity of SDB to impact marketing research. However, despite the evident importance of controlling for SDB in the field of marketing, researchers have failed to adequately address the impact of SDB in OCB research.

ORGANIZATIONAL CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIOR In the present study, the independent variables of interest consist of the five dimensions of OCB recognized by Organ (1988). The five primary dimensions of OCB are defined as follows. Altruism refers to non-compulsory behavior directed toward helping a fellow employee with tasks that are germane to organizational operations. Civic virtue represents voluntary participation in and support of organizational functions- of both a professional and social nature. Conscientiousness consists of the performance of role requirements beyond their minimum standard. Courtesy is the discretionary enactment of behaviors that mitigate work- related problems with others. Finally, sportsmanship involves abstaining from making an issue out of matters that, while bothersome or irritating, are of little consequence in the broader scheme of things. The sixth independent variable is a secondorder latent construct referred to as "helping behavior." Recognized by Organ (1988), this is widely utilized within the sales literature (e.g., MacKenzie et al. 1991, 1993; MacKenzie et al. 1999; Podsakoff and MacKenzie 1994). The helping behavior dimension consists of the altruism, courtesy, and peacekeeping dimensions, as well as some elements of the cheerleading dimension identified by Organ (1988, 1990). Peacekeeping refers to behaviors aimed at preventing or mediating conflict among coworkers. The cheerleading dimension primarily involves the verbal encouragement of fellow employees. Hypotheses Social-desirability response bias has the general effect of inducing respondents to exaggerate their self- reported assessments of normatively positive behavior (Fisher 1993; Mick 1996), such as their organizational citizenship behaviors (cf. Organ 1988). Thus, it is reasonable to predict that SDB is positively related to self-reported measures of OCB. Because of this, SDB should be expected to interfere somewhat with any evidence of a relationship between OCB and performance. Partialing out the effect of SDB should therefore strengthen the observed relationship between these variables. Hl: Social-desirability response bias will be positively related to OCB. H2: Partialing out SDB will strengthen the relationship between performance and OCB. Several antecedent, consequent, and mediating OCB relationships within sales contexts have been explored (MacKenzie, Podsakoff, and Ahearne 1998; Neterneyer et al. 1997). However, OCB research within the area of sales has primarily focused on assessing the relationship between OCB and individual agent performance as measured by managerial evaluations (MacKenzie et al. 1991, 1993; MacKenzie et al. 1999; Podsakoff and MacKenzie 1994). Notably, research indicates that OCB explains a significant portion of the variance in subjective evaluations that cannot be explained by objective performance measures alone.

Working with an insurance sales manager sample, Podsakoff and MacKenzie (1994) proposed that the OCB dimensions of helping behavior, civic virtue, and sportsmanship would all be positively related to organizational performance, operationalized as sales unit effectiveness. Specifically, the authors reasoned that organizational citizenship behavior: (1) allows for the interdependencies among organizational members to be more appropriately managed, thereby furthering collective organizational outcomes; (2) decreases the need for scarce resources to be utilized for maintenance functions; and (3) enhances the opportunity for fellow employees, as well as manager, to perform their own jobs. However, contrary to Podsakoff and MacKenzie's (1994) expectations, only civic virtue and sportsmanship showed a positive relationship with unit performance. Helping behavior, by contrast, exhibited a significantly negative relationship with unit performance. This finding led the authors to speculate that helping behavior, a part of which is altruism, might have a negative impact on source performance, or the individual- level sales performance of the "helping" agent, that is not offset by the positive impact on target performance that results from it. Although the authors endeavored to address this anomaly, they lacked the appropriate data to draw any definitive conclusions. Podsakoff and MacKenzie's (1994) findings and inferences have clear implications regarding the need to assess the impact of OCB on the performance of individual sales personnel. Working from the foregoing empirical findings and tentative conclusions, certain hypotheses can be advanced. For instance, we can surmise that those dimensions of OCB that represent an expenditure of personal effort and time by an individual on behalf of another (e.g., altruism, helping behavior) are likely to exhibit a negative relationship with performance. On the other hand, those activities that are likely to mitigate workrelated problems (e.g., courtesy, conscientiousness), be of personal benefit to the source (e.g., civic virtue), or represent the absence of the expenditure of personal time and effort (i.e., sportsmanship) are likely to show a positive relationship with performance. These rationales are consistent with the work of Saxe and Weitz (1982) regarding the shortterm, and potentially long-term, costs to performance that are incurred by salespersons that exhibit a customer-oriented sales approach. Therefore, the following hypotheses are advanced: H3: The relationship between performance and helping behavior will be negative. H4: The relationship between performance and altruism will be negative. H5: The relationship between performance and sportsmanship will be positive. H6: The relationship between performance and civic virtue will be positive. H7: The relationship between performance and courtesy will be positive. H8: The relationship between performance and conscientiousness will be positive. METHODOLOGY The sample consisted of 234 undergraduate students enrolled in business courses at a public university in the Southeastern United States. The method of data collection consisted of a written questionnaire hand-delivered to students. Questionnaires were deleted from consideration if they: (1) were filled out by graduate-level students (this approach was taken to maintain sample homogeneity); (2) showed evidence of careless response patterns on the primary variables of interest (only one questionnaire did so); or (3) did not report term GPA. The result was 211 usable surveys, equivalent to a response rate of 90%.

Measuring OCB Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) represented the independent variable. It was assessed by way of 17 items borrowed from two scales (Podsakoff and MacKenzie 1994; and MacKenzie et al. 1993). Items reflective of helping behavior (incorporating altruism, courtesy, cheerleading, and peacemaking), civic virtue, and sportsmanship were drawn from Podsakoff and MacKenzie (1994), while those reflective of conscientiousness were taken from MacKenzie et al. (1993). Item wording was modified to accommodate the productive context of the student sample. Self-reported measures are a viable alternative to third-person ratings in the measurement of OCB (Netemeyer ct al. 1997), as well as a necessary step to take in order to assess the impact of SDB. Two measures of performance were assessed, viz., "productivity" and cumulative GPA. Productivity was operationalized as the product of course load for the last academic quarter of coursework and term GPA for the same quarter. This measure of productivity was adopted in order to measure performance in a way most closely analogous to an organizational setting, by incorporating both the quantity and quality aspects of standard measures of job performance. The effect of social-desirability response bias (SDB) was adjusted for empirically. Subjects responded to the 33item SDB questionnaire created by Marlowe and Crowne (1960). The response scale for this measure was truefalse, as prescribed by the authors. In order to ascertain whether SDB should be treated as a control variable in measuring the impact of OCB on individual performance, it is necessary to perform a moderator analysis. The effect of SDB was thus assessed using hierarchical regression analysis. The two performance measures were first regressed against the components of OCB, and then SDB was entered as a moderator. The statistical significance associated with the change in total explanatory power between the two conditions was used to determine whether the impact of SDB on selfreported measures of OCB significantly influenced the measured relationship between OCB and performance. The change in partial correlations between the two conditions was then used to confirm the impact of SDB on specific components of OCB. RESULTS Means, standard deviations, intercorrelations, and reliabilities are presented in Table 1. The sample was 43% male with an average age of 22.25. Total productivity, defined as the product of the previous term's GPA (mean = 3.02) and course load (mean = 10.09 hours), ranged from zero to 57 units (mean = 30.91). Average cumulative GPA was 2.96 on a 4-point scale. Average hours studied per week was 8.67. The mean academic rank was 3.57 (3 =junior, 4 = senior). Following the work of MacKenzie et al. (1993), a principal-components factor analysis of those items representing the dimensions of altruism, civic virtue, sportsmanship, and conscientiousness was conducted. The items representing courtesy were also included in this analysis, as courtesy represents one of the five primary dimensions of OCB acknowledged by Organ (1988). A four- factor solution emerged that included altruism (a = .83), civic virtue (a = .86), conscientiousness (a = .57), and sportsmanship ((x = .80). There were no cross- or weak loadings using an item-factor correlation criterion of .40. Three of the four scales retained from the factor analysis demonstrated good reliabilities according to Nunnally (1978). Conscientiousness, however, showed weak alpha reliability, suggesting that any results related to this particular facet of OCB must be taken with some informed caution.

In addition to verifying MacKenzie et al.'s (1993) factor structure, an attempt was made to replicate the factor structure achieved by Podsakoff and MacKenzie (1994), which consists of helping behavior (courtesy, cheerleading, peacemaking, and altruism), sportsmanship, and civic virtue. One courtesy item crossloaded and consequently was deleted, but the outcome was otherwise identical to MacKenzie et al.'s (1993) factor structure, with the addition of a dimension consisting of helping behavior minus altruism. This atheoretical variant of helping behavior showed an alpha reliability of .77. However, since altruism did not emerge as part of it, Podsakoff and MacKenzie's (1994) model could not be considered replicated in this study. As a result, the helping behavior dimension was not taken into consideration in any further analyses. Consequently, hypothesis 3 predicting a negative relationship between helping behaviors and performance could not be assessed. Nor could hypothesis 7 be assessed, which predicted a positive relationship between performance and courtesy, since courtesy only emerged as part of the helping behavior dimension. Pearson product-moment correlations were computed among productivity, cumulative GPA, global OCB, and each of the four dimensions comprising OCB that emerged in the factor analysis. Scores on the Crowne- Marlowe (1960) SDB scale were also included in the analysis. Zero-order correlations were first computed to evaluate the general relationships among the variables (lower diagonal). SDB (= .76 ) was then partialed out to check for changes in any correlations due to the SDB effect. Whether the productivity measure or cumulative GPA was used as the criterion, the impact of OCB on productivity is clear from the correlation analysis. Moreover, SDB was indeed shown to be positively related to OCB, which supports hypothesis 1. Partialing out SDB had the general effect of strengthening this observed relationship, which supports hypothesis 2. Regression Analysis Multiple, hierarchical regression analysis was conducted on the four viable subscales of OCB (altruism, civic virtue, conscientiousness, and sportsmanship) and the two performance measures, with SDB entered as a moderator (Table 2). These analyses demonstrated that SDB had attenuated the relationship between OCB and both productivity and cumulative GPA by means of its effect on selfreported measures for some, but not all, subscales. Specifically, prior to controlling for SDB, both conscientiousness and civic virtue showed significant relationships with productivity (p = .038 and p = .025, respectively, both positive). With SDB controlled for, sportsmanship showed a significant relationship as well (p = .008, positive). With respect to the criterion variable of cumulative GPA, only the conscientiousness subscale showed a significant relationship with cumulative GPA before entering SDB (p = .006, positive). With SDB controlled for, sportsmanship now showed a significant relationship as well (p = .025, positive). These findings offer support for hypotheses 5, 6, and 8, which predicted that sportsmanship, civic virtue, and conscientiousness would show a positive relationship with OCB, respectively. Conversely, altruism did not show the negative relationship with performance predicted under hypothesis 4. Therefore, it is clear from these results that SDB attenuates the relationship between performance and OCB via its impact on specific OCB dimensions (civic virtue, conscientiousness, and sportsmanship), which suggests that OCB dimensions are not equally vulnerable to the SDB effect. Lastly, the impact of OCB on productivity, which was operationalized as closely to actual workplace performance as possible, is clearly stronger than its impact on cumulative GPA, which represents work quality but not quantity.

DISCUSSION The findings presented herein suggest that some components of OCB do indeed lead to greater individual performance. Furthermore, these findings strongly indicate that research into OCB must incorporate a measure of SDB in order to control for the inflation in self-reported OCB scores that is likely to occur. In the present study, failure to control for SDB would have concealed some critical evidence demonstrating relationships between OCB and performance that could be of great value in both research and in practical applications. Given these findings, it is clear that SDB must be taken into consideration in all OCB research. This also raises the question of how many earlier studies in OCB showed nonsignificant results because of a failure to control for SDB. Some such studies might merit a reevaluation in light of these findings. Future research should address the dimensions of OCB that are relevant within a sales context (cf. MacKenzie et al. 1991; MacKenzie et al. 1993; MacKenzie et al. 1999; and Podsakoff and MacKenzie 1994). The present research confirms past research by suggesting that OCB dimensionality depends on the context in which the construct is being applied (e.g., MacKenzie et al. 1993; Podsakoff and MacKenzie 1994). Consequently, within each research domain (e.g., personal selling), we should expect a particular type of dimensionality to emerge. This potentiality should therefore be explored. The limitations in this study mainly concern the use of a student sample, which restricts the generalizability of the observed relationship between OCB and individual performance to an academic context. Despite this limitation, the present findings suggest that a similar relationship may be found in an actual sales setting and consequently justify continued research in that area. Meanwhile, these findings do indeed offer preliminary insights into the relationship between the dimensions of OCB and individual performance. REFERENCES Crowne, Douglas. P. and David Marlowe (1960), "A New Scale of Social Desirability Independent of Psychopathology," Journal of Consulting Psychology, 24 (4), 349-354, Fisher, Robert J. (1993), "Social Desirability Bias and the Validity of Indirect Questioning," Journal of Consumer Research, 20 (September), 303- 315. Fisher, Robert J. (2000), "The Future of SocialDesirability Bias in Research in Marketing," Psychology and Marketing, 17 (February), 73-77. MacKenzie, Scott B., Philip M. Podsakoff, and Michael Ahearne (1998), "Some possible Antecedents and Consequences of In-Role and Extra-Role Salesperson Performance," Journal of Marketing, 62 (July), 87-98. MacKenzie, Scott B., Philip M. Podsakoff, and Richard Fetter (1991), "Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Objective Productivity as Determinants of Managerial Evaluations of Salespersons' Performance," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50 (1), 123-150. MacKenzie, Scott. B., Philip M. Podsakoff, and Richard Fetter, R. (1993), "The Impact of Organizational Citizenship Behavior on Evaluations of Salesperson Performance," Journal of Marketing, 57 (1), 70-80. MacKenzie, Scott. B., Philip M. Podsakoff, and Julie Beth Paine (1999), "Do Citizenship Behaviors Matter More for Managers Than for Salespeople?" Academy of Marketing Science Journal, 27 (4), 396-410.

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