Influence of Organizational Citizenship Behaviour on Performance of Casual Employees in Public Universities in Kenya

Abstract

The objective of this study was to establish the role of organizational citizenship behavior on the performance of casual employees in the Kenyan public universities. Specifically, the study was to establish the influences of sportsmanship, altruism, civic virtue, courtesy, conscientiousness on casual employees’ performance and work environment as a moderating variable. The population of the study comprised casual employees in five selected public universities in Kenya. The selected Universities included University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, The Co-operative University and Multimedia University. The target population comprised 3130 casual employees in the five public universities with a sample size of 310 casual employees. Qualitative research design was used whereby questionnaires were given to the respondents to fill and descriptive statistics embraced to analyze data using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 16.0. The findings of the study showed that all the five constructs of OCB under consideration namely; sportsmanship, altruism, civic virtue, conscientiousness and courtesy influenced casual employees’ performance in Kenyan public universities significantly positive. Sportsmanship significantly showed a positive correlation with casual employees’ performance similar with altruism which correlated significantly with casual employees’ performance. Likewise, civic virtue showed similar positive correlation with employees ‘performance similar with courtesy and conscientiousness which significantly affected casual employees’ performance positively. Using moderated multiple regression analysis the moderating effect of the variable work environment was analysed by interpreting the R2 change and was found to be positive.This therefore indicates that work environment moderates sportsmanship, altruism, civic virtue, conscientiousness and courtesy significantly positively with casual employees’ performance in Kenyan public universities. It is therefore concluded that the five constructs of OCB considered in this study i.e. sportsmanship, altruism, courtesy, civic virtue and conscientiousness influence the performance of casual employees in Kenyan public universities. Work environment on the other hand moderates sportsmanship, altruism, courtesy, civic virtue and conscientiousness significantly positively with casual employees’ performance. The study recommends that its appropriate for the management of public universities in Kenya to consider encouraging and promoting sportsmanship, altruism, civic virtue, courtesy, conscientiousness and conducive work environments in the cadre of casual employees as approaches to enhance positive performance.