Influence of collectivism on organisational citizenship behaviour of construction participants

To understand how employees may behave is an important part of formulating human resource policy. Employee's extra-role behaviour, notably organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB), reflects a person's willingness to go beyond his/her normal duty. Following the role behaviour perspective, which considers how cultural phenomena affect one's willingness to follow the work script, it is important to understand cultural contingency models, which address individualistic and collectivistic cooperation, to design effective management systems in different cultural settings. This paper investigates the relationship of individualism-collectivism and OCB of construction participants in the different organisational settings of public and private organisations. In general, collectivism has a positive correlation with OCB in the private sector but such relationship is inconclusive in the public sector. Since the results differ between the private and the public organisations, the understanding of their differences in cooperative mechanisms is important, especially in the case of multinational teams in public-private partnerships. © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.