Developing situational judgment tests to assess organizational citizenship behaviours

a) Purpose
As Organizational Citizenship Behaviours (OCBs) positively influence a number of important outcomes (e.g. job performance, unit productivity, organizational efficiency, etc.) and are valued by managers as well, Organ, Podsakoff and Podsakoff (2010) assert the need “to try to identify and select those job candidates who have a propensity to exhibit these behaviours” (p.314). This study provides some empirical evidence about using Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) for this specific target and allows us to discuss the main methodological issues in the development of such SJTs.

b) Method
Based on relevant best practices and recommendations from the literature (e.g. Weekley, Ployhart & Holtz, 2006), two distinct SJTs were especially developed to comply with OCBs assessment. The two SJTs differ on their job specificity degree (project manager in the industrial sector vs transversal function in the services sector), both propose ten different work related situations and, for each stem, five action proposals are available. Data were collected through online survey on two different samples (220 white collars professionals and 291 university students). Professionals were allowed to choose which SJT they wanted to participate, students were randomized within the two SJTS. An experimental manipulation of the response instructions (ipsative vs normative) was added within the student sample. OCBs were concurrently collected using self-reported measurement scales.

c) Results
In both samples (respectively professionals and students), the internal consistency was higher for the “job specific” SJT (α = .79 & .81) than for the “transversal job” SJT (α = .49 & 64). Notwithstanding, significant relations were found between the SJT scores and overall OCB ratings for both of the SJT forms in each of the two samples (r ranged from .30 to .57). Other specifics findings also provided substantial evidence for the concurrent validity of the SJTs to measure sub-dimensions of OCBs (altruism, courtesy, civic virtue, sportsmanship, loyalty and voice).

d) Conclusions
This study is, to our knowledge, the first to address the development and validation of a SJT for the assessment of OCBs. Review of the literature indicates that researches on techniques to predict OCBs are scarce and the present findings appear to surpass the average personality traits validity coefficients (r= .20) according to Organ & al. (2010)’s meta-analysis. There are two main practical implications. The first is the opportunity to use OCBs-SJTs as an alternative to assess applicants OCBs for job-specific or generic personnel selection issue. The second is to provide methodological development advices (e.g. the choice of response instruction) to ensure the SJT match the OCBs assessment requirement. Principal current limitations call for further research development that will be discussed: using different sources of OCBs rating, testing the incremental validity on personality tests, determining whether OCBs-SJTs are correlated with cognitive ability and establishing criterion validity with job performance.