Personality and Organizational Citizenship Behaviour in Hotel Industry: A Relationship Study

In todays' working environment, the issue of personality has become essential to all organizations as it determines the capability of employees performance. This study was carried out as an attempt to highlight the role of personality towards the Organizational Citizenship Behavior performed by the employees in the three-star hotels in Selangor, Malaysia. In order to identify the relationship between personality and Organizational Citizenship Behavior, questionnaires were distributed to the middle level management employees and received a 100 percent response return rate. The questionnaire was adopted from Goldberg (1999) for personality and from Podsakoff et al (1990) for Organizational Citizenship Behavior with minor modification. A Five Factor Model of personality (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience and Neuroticism) has been tested with the Organizational Citizenship Behavior. Section A of the survey concerned on the demographic information of respondents such as gender, race, age, highest educational background and working experience. Section B of the instrument focused on the type of employees' personality in the organization which consists of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience, and Neuroticism, while Section C emphasized on the employees Organizational Citizenship Behavior in the organization. This section was important to determine the level of employees' Organizational Citizenship Behavior. Two types of statistics were applied, descriptive and inferential statistics. For the descriptive statistics, this study used frequency, percentage and mean. On the inferential statistics, this study used the Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient based on the relevancy to indicate the direction, strength and significance of the bivariate relationships of all the variables in the study. Based on the objectives and research questions developed, the findings revealed that the employees in the organizations had high level of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience as well as a moderate level of Neuroticism. In relation to this, employees in the organizations were also found to have high level of Organizational Citizenship Behavior. Furthermore, the findings related to correlation, revealed that Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience has a positive and significant relationship with Organizational Citizenship Behavior, while Neuroticism were found to have a negative and significant relationship to the Organizational Citizenship Behavior. Therefore, employees with high level of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience tend to perform Organizational Citizenship Behavior.