Predicting job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior with individualism-collectivism in P.R. China and the United States

Three major hypotheses were examined in this cross-cultural study. First, Chinese employees were hypothesized to have a stronger collectivistic orientation and a weaker individualistic orientation than their American colleagues. Second, individualism and collectivism were hypothesized to be significant predictors of both job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Third, individualism and collectivism were hypothesized to be moderators of either the relationship between perceived organizational justice and job satisfaction or the relationship between perceived organizational justice and OCB. Participants consisted of 299 employees of two organizations in the northern part of China and 162 employees of several organizations in the southeastern area of the United States. Based on some recent findings, individualism and collectivism were taken as two independent substructures of the individualism-collectivism (IC) construct. In addition, the four-dimension concept of the IC proposed by Triandis (1995) was examined within both the Chinese sample and the American sample with a factor analytic method. The results of the factor analysis suggested that the IC scale used in this study only measured one factor (collectivism) within the Chinese sample and two factors (collectivism and individualism) within the American sample. An independent sample t-test showed that the Chinese employees reported a lower average score on collectivism and a higher average score on individualism than their American colleagues. Intervariable correlation analysis revealed that collectivism had significant and positive correlations with both job satisfaction and self-reported OCB within both the American sample and the Chinese sample. However, the correlation between collectivism and supervisor-rated OCB was not significant in either sample. Individualism was found to have very weak correlations with these dependent variables, including job satisfaction, self-reported OCB and supervisor-rated OCB. The convergent correlation between self-reported OCB and supervisor-rated OCB was unsatisfactorily low. Moderated regression analysis showed that the hypothesized moderating effects of IC on the relationship between organizational justice and either job satisfaction or OCB received very little support. Some possible factors that could contribute to these unexpected findings were discussed. Finally, some suggestions for future research were proposed.