Citizenship Behavior and Social Exchange

Author(s): Mary A. Konovsky and S. Douglas Pugh

Source: The Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Jun., 1994), pp. 656-669
Published by: Academy of Management
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? Academy of Management Journal
1994, Vol. 37, No. 3, 656-669.

CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIOR AND SOCIAL EXCHANGE

MARY A. KONOVSKY
S. DOUGLAS PUGH
Tulane University

This article develops and empirically examines a social exchange

model of organizational citizenship behavior. An employee's trust in a
supervisor is proposed to mediate the relationship between procedural
fairness in the supervisor's decision making and employee citizenship.
Data from 475 hospital employees and their supervisors were consis-
tent with our model. We discuss future research directions.

Katz (1964) identified three categories of employee behavior essential

for organizational effectiveness. According to Katz, individuals must first be
induced to enter and remain with an organization; as employees, they must
carry out specific role requirements in a dependable fashion; and they must
engage in innovative and spontaneous activity that goes beyond role pre-
scriptions. Smith, Organ, and Near (1983) dubbed this last category of em-
ployee behavior "organizational citizenship behavior" (OCB). Citizenship
behavior is employee behavior that is above and beyond the call of duty and
is therefore discretionary and not rewarded in the context of an organiza-
tion's formal reward structure. As early as 1964, Katz recognized the impor-
tance of organizational citizenship behavior for organizational effectiveness.
Although a good deal of research has been conducted on organizational
citizenship behavior, the development of OCB theory has progressed rather
slowly. Organ's social exchange interpretation of organizational citizenship
behavior (1988) was a promising step toward a theory, and a small number
of empirical studies have examined various aspects of Organ's interpreta-
tion. For example, Folger and Konovsky (1989) demonstrated that proce-
dural, not distributive, justice predicted trust in supervisor, one of the key
components of social exchange (Blau, 1964). Yet the research on organiza-
tional citizenship behavior has been conducted largely without a theoretical
framework, often referencing, but failing to systematically explore, Organ's
social exchange theory and failing to specify how issues such as fairness and
trust are crucial to the development of social exchange relationships.
The purpose of this study was to test a social exchange model of organ-
izational citizenship behavior in which (1) procedural justice is central to
the development of employees' trust in their supervisors and (2) trust in
supervisor mediates the relationship between justice and OCB. The super-
visor-employee relationship was the focus of our study because social ex-
change implies an informal contract between an employee and an organiza-

656
1994 Konovsky and Pugh 657

tion. The employee's supervisor largely represents the organization to the

employee. Turning away from discussions of contracts between employees
and depersonalized organizations, we focused on the often personalized
relationships between employees and their supervisors.
Our study goes beyond the existing research in two ways. First, we
provide a compelling theoretical framework for our model. We attempted to
clearly explicate and test a social exchange model of organizational citizen-
ship behavior, which should aid understanding of its nature and determi-
nants. We also measured the variables central to our model and simulta-
neously examined their interrelationships.
We would like to add one caveat before we present our model. Although
we examined two important situational factors, fairness and trust, critical to
social exchange, we are not arguing that factors suggested by other theories
do not also account for organizational citizenship behavior. In fact, a grand
theory of organizational citizenship behavior would include dispositional
factors as well as group- and organization-level situational factors. The
model we are proposing focuses on variables critical to a social exchange
interpretation of organizational citizenship behavior and is based on the
model of social exchange Blau (1964) presented. It is what Moore, Johns, and
Pinder (1980) termed a middle-range theory. Middle-range theories, which
are concerned not with all possible related phenomena, but with a few
phenomena, are abstract enough to transcend simple description but con-
crete enough to provide for the generation, consolidation, and evaluation of
empirical evidence that is liable to modification and refutation (Merton,
1968).

SOCIAL EXCHANGE AND CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIOR

Organ (1988) proposed that supervisor fairness leads to employee citi-

zenship because a social exchange relationship develops between employ-
ees and their supervisors. When supervisors treat employees fairly, social
exchange and the norm of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960) dictate that employ-
ees reciprocate, and Organ suggested that organizational citizenship behav-
ior is one likely avenue for employee reciprocation.
Blau (1964) was among the first to differentiate social exchange from
economic exchange. According to Blau, social exchange refers to relation-
ships that entail unspecified future obligations. Like economic exchange,
social exchange generates an expectation of some future return for contri-
butions; however, unlike economic exchange, the exact nature of that return
is unspecified. Furthermore, social exchange does not occur on a quid pro
quo or calculated basis. Economic exchange is based on transactions, but
social exchange relationships are based on individuals' trusting that the
other parties to the exchanges will fairly discharge their obligations in the
long run (Holmes, 1981). This trust is necessary for maintaining social ex-
change, especially in the short run, where some temporary or perceived
asymmetries may exist between an individual's inducements-that is, the
658 Academy of Management Journal June

benefits received from participation in the social exchange relationship-

and contributions, the individual's inputs into the relationship. Finally, the
expectation of long-term fairness in social exchange contrasts with the ex-
pectation of short-term fairness that typically characterizes economic ex-
change.
Blau's contrast of social and economic exchange parallels a distinction
made by Rousseau and Parks (1993) with regard to contracts. Rousseau and
Parks described contracts as agreements that create an obligation to do or not
do something. According to those authors, contracts vary along a continuum
anchored on one end by transactional contracts, which are short-term agree-
ments specifying the limited involvement of each party in the lives and
activities of the other, and at the other end by relational contracts, which
include the exchange of socioemotional elements, are open-ended, and are
often long-term. Relational and transactional contracts respectively corre-
spond to the underlying dynamics of social and economic exchange. We
therefore suggest that one manifestation of social exchange is reliance on
relational contracts and that one manifestation of economic exchange is
reliance on transactional contracts. This study focused on two important
issues emerging from the above discussion: (1) identifying determinants of
contract and exchange type and (2) the effect of each contract and exchange
type on employee behavior, specifically, organizational citizenship behav-
ior.
According to Blau (1964) and others (e.g., Clark & Mills, 1979; Rousseau
& Parks, 1993), trust and other "macromotives," such as loyalty and com-
mitment, provide the basis for relational contracts and social exchange. Mac-
romotives are sets of attributions that characterize people's feelings and
beliefs about their exchange partners; an example is "My supervisor is trust-
worthy" (Holmes, 1981). Although trust is a key element in the emergence
and maintenance of social exchange relationships, theorists have largely
ignored the central issue of how trust emerges in these relationships
(Holmes, 1981). One source of trust in the employee-supervisor relationship
is procedural fairness (Lind & Tyler, 1988). The use of procedurally fair
supervisory practices affects higher-order issues such as employees' com-
mitment to a system and trust in its authorities because the use of fair
procedures demonstrates an authority's respect for the rights and dignity of
individual employees. This demonstrated respect indicates that an authority
is devoted to the principles of procedurally fair treatment, thus resulting in
the employees' trust in the long-run fairness of the relationship. Fair proce-
dures may also have symbolic meaning insofar as individuals are treated as
ends rather than means (Folger & Konovsky, 1989).
In contrast to procedural justice, distributive justice, or the fairness of
decision outcomes, is the typical metric for judging the fairness of transac-
tional contracts and economic exchange. A norm of distributive fairness
implies that the parties to an exchange give benefits with the expectation of
receiving comparable benefits in the short run. When the conditionality of
an exchange is salient, as it is when distributive justice and economic ex-
1994 Konovsky and Pugh 659

change characterize a situation, the expression of feelings like trust is un-

dercut because sufficient extrinsic explanations for the parties' continued
participation in the relationship exist. The conditionality of economic ex-
change also inhibits the development of trust because that development
requires evidence of one party's self-sacrifice and responsiveness to another
person's needs, which conditional exchanges do not provide (Holmes, 1981;
MacNeil, 1985). Transactional contracts and distributive justice are therefore
less likely than relational contracts and procedural justice to produce attri-
butions of trust. Thus,
Hypothesis 1: Procedural justice in a supervisor's deci-
sion making will be more likely than distributive justice
to predict a subordinate's trust in the supervisor.
Our second hypothesis focuses on the relationship between trust and
organizational citizenship behavior. As we noted above, trust is the basis of
relational contracts and social exchange. According to the vertical dyad
model of leadership (Dansereau & Graen, 1975), relational exchange between
supervisors and subordinates leads employees to expend much time and
energy on tasks, to be innovative in completing tasks, and to accept respon-
sibilities in addition to those specified in their employment contracts. Re-
lational contracts therefore encourage employees to behave in ways that are
not strictly mandated by their employers (Rousseau & Parks, 1993) and are
directed toward serving the collectivity (Graham, 1991). To the extent that
trust is a manifestation of social exchange and social exchange accounts for
organizational citizenship behavior, we predict the following:
Hypothesis 2: Trust will predict organizational citizen-
ship behavior and mediate the relationship between pro-
cedural justice and citizenship behavior.

METHODS
Data
Respondents for this study were the employees of a Department of Vet-
erans' Affairs hospital located in the south central United States. This hos-
pital employs approximately 1,700 individuals, 630 of whom (37%) volun-
tarily participated in the survey. Supervisors provided the organizational
citizenship behavior data for 1,169 (68.8%) employees. A complete em-
ployee questionnaire and a supervisor's OCB rating form were obtained for
475 (28%) of the hospital's employees. Of the 475 respondents, 56 percent
were men; the average age was 43 years, the average education, 15 years, and
the average organizational tenure, 10.5 years.1

1 Because we conducted our

survey in a hospital, a setting that is often characterized by a
work force composed mostly of women, the proportion of men (56%) in our respondent group
is noteworthy and may raise concerns about the generalizability of our results. The high pro-
(continued)
660 Academy of Management Journal June

Procedures

Hospital employees were informed of the survey through a joint memo

from the employees' union and top management. Employees met with a
researcher (one of the authors) during work hours, listened to an explanation
of the study procedures, and completed their surveys. Employees who were
unable to attend scheduled meetings received surveys from their supervi-
sors. Employees completed the surveys on work time and returned them, in
sealed envelopes, to a hospital location from which we periodically col-
lected them. We attended a hospital staff meeting to distribute the supervisor
surveys. Supervisors rated the level of organizational citizenship behavior
for each of the employees who directly reported to them and returned their
forms to the same hospital location employees used.

Analytic Method

According to the study's theoretical model, trust in a supervisor medi-

ates the relationship between procedural justice and organizational citizen-
ship behavior. Figure 1 presents the structural and measurement model pa-
rameters used as the basis for evaluating this model. The boxes in Figure 1
represent manifest or measured variables, and the circles represent latent or
unobserved constructs. We used LISREL VII (Joreskog & Sorbom, 1988) to
compare the fit of four nested models.
Model 1, the structural null model, which includes no relationships
among the latent variables or between the latent and manifest variables, was
used as the baseline model in this study. Model 2, the measurement model,
includes the parameters relating the manifest indicators to their latent con-
structs, the measurement errors associated with the indicators, and the cor-
relation between the exogenous variables. This study also examined two
theoretical models: model 3, a fully mediated model, in which trust medi-
ates all exogenous variable effects on organizational citizenship behavior,
and model 4, a partially mediated model, which specifies direct effects of
fairness on organizational citizenship behavior in addition to mediated ef-
fects.

portion of men had two causes: First, the services the Veterans' Administration hospital pro-
vided drew on many departments having predominantly male employees. In fact, an overall 40
percent of the employees at the hospital were men. Second, the response rate from nursing
services, the largest hospital service, and a predominantly female one, was low (13%). We have
little reason, however, to believe that gender or sampling bias threatened the generalizability of
our results. First, there is no existing empirical evidence and no theoretical reason to believe
that gender is a determinant of organizational citizenship behavior. The gender ratio among our
respondents is similar to that in other studies of OCB, and post hoc analyses of our data
comparing nursing services to other hospital services indicated no differences in variable re-
lationships among services or by gender. Second, any gender or volunteer bias would restrict
the range of our predictor and criterion variables and attenuate their relationships, not increase
them.
1994 Konovsky and Pugh 661

FIGURE 1
Representation of the Saturated Structural and Measurement Model

S6E
~62"H\- = [ I"\ E\ E3x

62
2_ 21 Justice 4X-4

---- Trust I 21 Citizenship 2 -

63 __ Behavior X5 _ 6_
,2 *5 42 -5

72?-

102
Justicep

The fit of the models was evaluated by comparing the difference in the
chi-square values of the adjacent models in the series to the difference in
their degrees of freedom (Bentler & Bonett, 1980). If the difference between
the chi squares of the null and measurement models, for example, is signif-
icant relative to the change in degrees of freedom, the parameters added in
the measurement model result in a better-fitting model and therefore remain
in the model for subsequent comparisons. The next model in the nested
series is then likewise compared to the best-fitting model emerging from the
previous comparison until the relative fit of all the models is evaluated.
Additional fit indexes provided by LISREL VII include the adjusted good-
ness-of-fit index and the root-mean-square residual. Two incremental fit
indexes, the Tucker-Lewis index (Tucker & Lewis, 1973) and the compara-
tive fit index (Bentler, 1990), were also calculated. These indexes assess the
improvement in the fit of a model relative to the baseline model. The incre-
mental fit indexes are independent of sample size and degrees of freedom, in
contrast to the adjusted goodness of fit and root-mean-square residual,
which perform poorly against the criteria of sample size and degrees of
freedom (Marsh, Balla, & McDonald, 1988). Bentler and Bonett (1980) sug-
gested that a value of .90 or higher for the Tucker-Lewis or comparative fit
index indicates an adequate fit of model to data.
662 Academy of ManagementJournal June

Measures

Procedural justice. Konovsky and Folger (1991) developed and vali-

dated the eight-item measure of procedural justice in supervisor decision
making used here. This measure reflects the six procedural justice rules
Leventhal (1990) identified; an example is "My supervisor allowed me to
state my views." Employees responded to the items using a scale ranging
from strongly disagree, 1, to strongly agree, 5.
Employees responded twice to the procedural fairness items, first de-
scribing their supervisors' overall decision making and second, the most
recent decision their supervisors made that directly affected them. Two de-
cision-making situations were used to seek preliminary evidence that this
study's results were stable over time; the alpha coefficient of reliability for
the fairness of supervisors' overall decision making and most recent deci-
sions were both .95.
Distributive justice. Two items developed by Tyler (1990) composed the
distributive justice measure; one was "How fair was the outcome you re-
ceived? (very unfair, 1, to very fair, 5). The interitem correlations for this
scale were .82 and .90 for supervisor's overall and most recent decision
making, respectively.
Trust in supervision. Employees' trust in their supervisors was assessed
using a three-item scale developed by Roberts and O'Reilly (1974); an ex-
ample is "How free do you feel to discuss with your immediate supervisor
the problems and difficulties you have in your job, without jeopardizing
your position or having it held against you?" (low level of trust, 1, to high,
7). Roberts and O'Reilly (1974) provided evidence for the convergent and
discriminant validity of this measure; the alpha was .88.
For the measures of procedural fairness, distributive fairness, and trust,
questionnaire items provided the indicators for the latent constructs. James,
Mulaik, and Brett (1982) recommended having three or four indicators for
each latent construct to avoid model identification problems. Only the two-
item distributive justice measure failed to meet this criterion. To avoid
the problems associated with having only two distributive justice indicators,
we constrained the measurement errors of the two distributive justice
items to be equal. The raw data indicated that this was a reasonable con-
straint.
Organizational citizenship behavior. A set of items largely similar to
the items in the Organizational Citizenship Behavior Scale developed by
Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman, and Fetter (1990) was used. This scale
includes measures of Smith and colleagues' (1983) original altruism and
generalized compliance factors and scales for three additional components
of OCB identified by Organ (1988). Altruism refers to interpersonal helping
and includes discretionary behaviors that assist another person with an or-
ganizationally relevant task or problem, conscientiousness to carrying out
role behaviors well beyond the minimum required levels, sportsmanship to
1994 Konovsky and Pugh 663

willingness to accept minor frustrations without complaint, courtesy to tak-

ing action to prevent problems from occurring by respecting others' needs,
and civic virtue (Graham, 1991) to responsible workplace participation.
Supervisors responded to 32 scale items using a seven-point response
scale ranging from strongly disagree, 1, to strongly agree, 7. A factor analysis
of the OCB items with principal axis extraction and varimax rotation re-
vealed a factor structure similar to that Podsakoff and colleagues (1990)
identified. We eliminated items that double-loaded or loaded on a factor
different from that proposed by those authors.
Conscientiousness was assessed with four items, including "maintains
a clean work place" (x = .84). Altruism was assessed by five items, includ-
ing "helps others who have been absent" (ac = .90). Sportsmanship was
assessed by five items, including "always finds fault with what the organ-
ization is doing" (reverse-coded; a = .88). Courtesy was measured by three
items, including "consults with me or other people who might be affected by
his/her actions or decisions" (ca = .87). Civic virtue was assessed by two
items, including "attends and participates in meetings regarding the com-
pany." The interitem correlation for this scale was .68.
The OCB factors were used as the five manifest indicators of organiza-
tional citizenship behavior for two reasons. The first was the sheer number
of items measuring citizenship behavior that were thus available. Models
having large numbers of indicators often result in failure to find a model that
fits well. The second reason was the potential for composite indicators (fac-
tors) of latent constructs to have high reliability (Bentler & Chou, 1987).

RESULTS

Table 1 displays the means, standard deviations, reliabilities, and zero-

order correlation coefficients for the study's latent constructs.
Table 2 displays the values of the fit indexes for overall supervisory
decision making. The pattern of results was identical for the most recent
supervisory decisions. We tested the adequacy of the measurement model by
comparing the measurement model and the null baseline model, as Ander-
son and Gerbing (1988) recommended. The difference in chi-square values
for the comparison was significant, indicating that the measurement model
provided a significant improvement in fit. The values of the remaining in-
cremental fit indexes, all of which were above .90, provided additional ev-
idence for the adequacy of the measurement model. In addition, examina-
tion of the factor loadings for the measurement model revealed values rang-
ing from 0.98 to 1.438, all significant values. Finally, examination of the
modification indexes revealed no exceedingly large values. The largest value
(13.051) was for an item measuring distributive justice that also correlated
highly with the procedural justice construct. This result was not surprising,
given the high correlation between procedural and distributive justice. The
664 Academy of Management Journal June

TABLE 1
Means, Standard Deviations, Reliabilities, and Zero-Order Correlations
for Study Variablesa
Variables Means s.d. 1 2 3 4 5 6
1. Organizational
citizenship
behavior 5.55 1.00 (.83)
2. Procedural
justice,
overall 3.90 1.07 .29** (.95)
3. Distributive
justice,
overall 3.90 1.14 .24** .80** (.82)
4. Procedural
justice, most
recent 3.81 1.12 .26** .89** .76** (.95)
5. Distributive
justice, most
recent 3.65 1.35 .20** .72** .73** .81** (.90)
6. Trust in
supervisor 5.12 2.17 .28** .77** .67** .76** .64** (.88)
a The more the
alpha coefficients of reliability for scales with than two items and interitem
correlations (for the two-variable distributive justice measures) are displayed in parentheses
and on the diagonal.
* p < .05
**
p < .01

weight of the evidence, however, suggests that our measurement model was
adequate and provided a firm basis for testing the theoretical models.2
We next compared the fits of the fully mediated and measurement mod-
els. The significant difference in chi-squares [X2 (3, N = 475) = 50.91]
indicated that the fully mediated model provided a better fit to the observed
data than the measurement model. Finally, comparing the fully mediated
and partially mediated models resulted in a nonsignificant change in chi-
square values [X2 (2, N = 475) = .94], leading us to conclude that the
partially mediated model did not improve fit. All values of the incremental

2
In deciding to use a two-factor structure for procedural and distributive justice, we relied
on theory and on our evidence and judgment. Theory and the results of testing our measurement
model indicated, for example, that a two-factor model of distributive and procedural justice
provides an acceptable description of the data. However, this should not be taken to indicate
that there is no evidence for alternative models of our justice items. When an exploratory factor
analysis of the items measuring procedural and distributive justice was conducted, for example,
all the items measuring procedural and distributive justice loaded on a single factor. Further-
more, when modeled as two factors, the measures of procedural and distributive justice are
highly correlated; for example, for overall supervisory decision making, the correlation is .80.
These results raise some doubts about the two-factor model of distributive and procedural
justice. We nevertheless concluded that theory and the confirmatory test of our measurement
model provided adequate evidence for a two-factor model of procedural and distributive justice.
 TABLE 2
Nested Model Comparisons for Overall Supervisory Decision M

Tucker-Lewis Comparativ
Models x2 df Ax2b Adf Indexb Fit Index
1. Null model 12,978.33*** 18
2. Measurement model 461.20*** 135 12,517.13*** 117 .995 .974
3. Completely mediated
model 410.29*** 132 50.91*** 3 .997 .979
4. Partially mediated
model 409.35*** 130 0.94 2 .997 .978
a
The pattern of results for the most recent supervisor decision is identical to that of overall supervisor
b To calculate the incremental fit indexes (the TLI and
CFI), we compared the measurement model, the p
mediated models to the null model. To calculate the change in chi-square, we compared adjacent pairs of m
with the null model.
*** p < .001
666 Academy of Management Journal June

FIGURE 2
Structural Path Estimates for the Best-Fitting, Fully Mediated Modela

Distributive
Justice
-.421 (-1.76)

9.47Trust \ .145 (4.99)** tz

19.47 (13.94)** in '
in * /) o
V ehai
\Behavior
Supervisor

.520 (2.32)*
Procedural
Justice

a Structural
path estimates are the unstandardized parameter estimates, and the associated
t-values are in parentheses. The measurement model (see Figure 1) and the residuals in the
structural equations have been omitted for simplicity of representation.
*p < .05
**p < .01

fit index were above the recommended .90 for the fully and partially medi-
ated models. The adjusted goodness-of-fit index approached the .90 cutoff
value. Because the fully mediated model was the most parsimonious, we
concluded that it provided the best fit of the models we evaluated. This
model accounted for 9 percent of the variance in organizational citizenship
behavior.
Figure 2 displays the structural coefficients and the correlations be-
tween procedural and distributive justice for the fully mediated model. The
data indicate that procedural justice is a significant predictor of trust in
supervisor, which in turn is a significant predictor of organizational citizen-
ship behavior. Distributive justice is not significantly related to trust in
supervisor.

DISCUSSION
The study's results are consistent with our social exchange model of
organizational citizenship behavior. The role of trust in supervisor as a me-
diator of the relationship between procedural justice and OCB suggests that
citizenship behaviors occur in a context in which social exchange charac-
terizes the quality of superior-subordinate relationships. Although alterna-
tive theoretical frameworks may explain additional variance in organization-
1994 Konovsky and Pugh 667

al citizenship behavior, our data indicate that social exchange is important

for explaining and predicting that variance.
Additionally, our results provide evidence that procedural justice is an
important determinant of employee behavior. There is considerable evi-
dence demonstrating that procedural justice is a predictor of employee atti-
tudes (e.g., Folger & Konovsky, 1989; Konovsky & Cropanzano, 1991). The
evidence that procedural justice also predicts employee behavior is slighter.
Finally, our study indicated that distributive justice did not predict OCB or
trust. This latter finding stands in contrast to Organ's (1988) theoretical
argument that procedural justice would be subordinate to distributive justice
in the employment context. The collective empirical evidence (e.g.,
Konovsky & Folger, 1991; Moorman, 1991; Podsakoff et al., 1990) and our
data all converge and suggest that procedural justice is not subordinate to
distributive justice in determining organizational citizenship behaviors in
the employment context.
Our study may also illuminate organizational research on contracts.
Rousseau and Parks (1993), for example, noted that it is important to identify
the variables that influence employees to perceive their contracts with their
employers as relational or transactional. Our study suggests that procedural
justice may influence perceptions of contract type.
The fact that our model accounted for only 9 percent of the variance in
organizational citizenship behavior indicates that variables other than those
examined in this study are needed to account for additional variance. Re-
searchers (e.g., Graham & Dienesch, 1991) have demonstrated that employee
commitment, for example, accounts for organizational citizenship behavior
variance, and we suggest that commitment, like trust, is a macromotive
indicating the presence of social exchange. Thus, Graham's model of com-
mitment and OCB, which is grounded in political philosophy, can be inter-
preted as providing evidence that additional social exchange variables (or
indeed, non-social exchange variables) need to be added to our model.
The interpretation of our study's results is subject to qualification. Cor-
relational studies do not provide irrefutable evidence of causation, and fur-
ther laboratory or longitudinal studies are needed to firmly establish causal
direction. Correlational studies also do not eliminate the threat of alternative
explanations for our variable relationships, such as common method vari-
ance. Common method concerns in our study are partially alleviated be-
cause employees' supervisors provided the ratings of organizational citizen-
ship behavior, thus eliminating the presence of a common method among
the predictor and criterion variables.
Concerns may also be raised about the measures of fairness. One could
argue that procedural justice predicted trust because we used more items to
measure procedural justice than distributive justice (eight versus two), re-
sulting in more measurement precision for procedural justice. Post hoc anal-
yses were used to evaluate this argument. In three drawings, we randomly
selected two of the eight procedural justice items to be the manifest indica-
tors of procedural justice and then evaluated the fully mediated model pre-
668 Academy of Management Journal June

sented in Figure 2. The significant structural paths always corresponded to

those displayed in Figure 2, indicating that the number of items measuring
procedural justice was irrelevant to determining those paths.
Finally, future research is needed to establish the external validity of
our model of organizational citizenship behavior. Our study indicated that a
social exchange model of citizenship behavior holds for overall and most
recent supervisory decision making for hospital employees. Only additional
research can determine whether these results will be found in other popu-
lations and contexts.

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Mary A. Konovsky is an associate professor of organizational behavior at the A. B.

Freeman School of Business of Tulane University. She received her master's degree in
psychology and her M.B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University. Her research
interests are fairness in management decision making and organizational citizenship
behavior.
S. Douglas Pugh is a doctoral student at the A. B. Freeman School of Business, Tulane
University. His current research interests focus on organizational citizenship behavior
and compliance in organizations.