The Effect of Human Resource Management (HRM) Practices in Service-Oriented Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB): Case of Telecommunications and Internet Service Providers in Malaysia

In the human resource management-organizational performance research context, this paper is focusing on the effect of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices (pay practice, job security, training and development, supervisor support) on service-oriented Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) in Malaysian telecommunication and internet service providers. A quantitative study was conducted on 204 customer-contact employees who working in telecommunications and internet service providers in Malaysia. Correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis were applied to analyse the relationships between HRM practices and service-oriented OCB. The results indicate that, job security, training and development, supervisor support and overall perceptions of HRM practices have positive and significant effect on service-oriented OCB with the exception for pay practice.


Introduction
Service sector is one of the most important element in Malaysia economy growth and development (Central Bank of Malaysia, 2007;Department of Statistics Malaysia, 2013;Malaysian Industrial Development Authority, 2013;New Straits Times, 2015;The Star, 2014).Telecommunications and internet service providers in Malaysia are trying hard to offer better user experience but poor customer service from service providers are still remains a big problem for consumers.Aizzat, Hazlina and Tan (2012) argued that scorecard evaluation by telecommunication and internet service providers to their customers are not helpful to improve the service quality.A report from Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) shows that majority of customer's complaints based on poor service from customer-contact employees (35%), followed by service or product content (16.7%), monthly bill and charging (13.9%),SMS (10.1%), no network coverage (4.3%) and poor service coverage (3.5%) (MCMC, 2013).The highest percentage of customer complaints due to poor service reflect the real situation of telecommunications and internet service provider's services in Malaysia.There is a significant gap between consumers expected and perceived service quality from Malaysian telecommunication and internet service providers.
To address this issue, service-oriented organizations have to analyse and develop their employee's service-oriented Organizational Citizenship Behaviours (OCB).According to Organ (1998), the employees who have the extra role behaviour could help to increase their organizational effectiveness and productivity.Generally, Organ, Podsakoff and Mackenzie (2006) defined OCB as employee's discretionary behaviour that go beyond their formal job requirements and descriptions which is not reimbursed by the reward system.Moreover, OCB is usually support to organizational performance and competitive advantage (Nemeth & Staw, 1989).Besides that, Bateman and Organ (1983) stated that numerous studies were conducted widely to analyse OCB since it was introduced about twenty years ago.
Besides that, past researches on OCB had focused only on the general form of organizational citizenship behaviour.In addition, only few studies had focused on specific forms of OCB personalised to a particular sector such as in a service sector.For instance, Bettencourt and Brown (1997) were conducted few studies on particular forms of OCB such as service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviours (service-oriented OCB) and studies show that limited guidance and attention have been given to specify organizational practices that elicit service-oriented OCB.The definition of Bettencourt and Brown (1997) on service-oriented OCB is discretionary behaviours of customer-contact employees in a service provider organization that go beyond formal job requirements.
In the case of Malaysia, past studies had conducted only on service-oriented OCB relate to the agricultural business, logistics industry, hospitality industries and public sector (Chaudhry & Usman, 2011;Ladebo, 2004;Nasurdin, Ling, & Fun, 2011;Sun, Aryee, & Law, 2007).Thus, lack of study has been focused on developing customer-contact employee's service-oriented OCB in Malaysian telecommunications and internet service provider.
Besides that, there is limited studies on specific organizational practices that may influence OCB.This observation was made based on the way of an organization approach to Human Resource Management (HRM) practices that can lead to high levels of OCB (Morrison, 1996) and also the way of an organization manages its human resources to set the good conditions and high quality for the relationship between organization and employee (MacDuffie, 1995;Rousseau & Greller, 1994).
Thus, HRM practices play an important role in the organizational success and operation.Moreover, HRM practices are one part of organizational-based resource that can support employees in reducing their job demands and the associated psychological and physiological costs, motivating their personal learning, growth and development achieving their job goals (Salanova, Agut, & Peiro, 2005).Hence, there is a reason to conducts study on how the HRM practices help the organization manage their employees in achieving higher success and performance (Abdullah, Ahsan, & Alam, 2009).Besides that, most of the past empirical studies found that HRM practices have positive significant effect on organizational performance and there is extensive evidence that systems of HRM practices are associated with different measures of organizational performance (Arthur, 1994;Appelbaum, Bailey, Berg, & Kalleberg, 2000;Guthrie, 2001;MacDuffie, 1995;Wright, Gardner, Moynihan, & Allen, 2003).However, there is only few studies described the processes through which HRM practices effect the primary intermediate variables that ultimately influence the performance of an organization (Becker, Huselid, Pickus, & Spratt, 1997).
A review of past studies shows that HRM practices are major element in influencing positive OCB within the services sector (Liao et al., 2009;Tsaur & Lin, 2004;Tang & Tang, 2012).However, these studies have been only conducted in Japan, United States of America and Taiwan respectively.According to Paine and Organ (2000), and Turnipseed and Murkison (1993), national cultures have significant effects on the performance of OCB.Thus, given the differences in culture between Malaysia and other countries, findings by Sun et al. (2007) in other countries may not be generalizable to Malaysia.In the Malaysian context, majority of studies on HRM practices were focused on organizational-level outcomes (i.e.organizational performance) with less interested were given to individual-level outcomes (Daud & Ahmad, 2003;Rose & Kumar, 2006).Moreover, Wright et al. (2003) had investigated the relationship between HRM practices and organizational performance.The result of study shows that HRM practices affect the organizational performance through its influences of individual employee attitudes and behaviours (Wright et al., 2003).
Thus, there is still a great interest in finding further evidence about the linkages between HRM practices and service-oriented OCB.Based on the above discussion, the main objective of this research is to bridge the gaps by analysing the relationship between HRM practices and service-oriented OCB in the context of telecommunications and internet service providers in Malaysia.

Literature Review
Zerbe, Dobni and Harel (1998) is mentioned that the relationship between HRM practices and strategic outcomes is solidest in service organizations as opposed to manufacturing organizations.When employees get satisfied with their organization's HRM practices, employees are more likely to contribute their resources and energies for providing a good service to their customers (Schneider & Bowen, 1985).This statement is consistent with Ogilvie (1986)'s perception of HRM practices which shows the level of concern that organization appears to have their employees.Employees are more willing to perform OCB's when organization's increased social exchange relationships with employees (Morrison, 1996).
HRM practices highly contribute on long-term relationships with employees through the delivery of continuous education and development programs, individualized orientation activities, promotion opportunities, supportive benefits and assurances of job security which more likely to lead to greater OCB's (Morrison, 1996).Besides that, Sun et al. (2007) argued that high performance HRM practices which include the delivery of extensive skills training, promotion and job security from within can collectively affect organizational level performance in terms of grouped service-oriented OCB over two means: (1) These practices indicate organization's target to create a long-term relationships with their employees; and (2) Represents the organization's encouragements that by creating employees' perception of a supportive work environment and satisfying employee goals.From a social exchange perspective (Blau, 1964), employees are mostly become grateful and motivated to respond with service-oriented OCB under these circumstances (Sun et al., 2007).
Based on previous studies arguments (Fiorito et al., 2007;Harel & Tzafrir, 1999;Sun et al., 2007;Whitener, 2001;Zerbe et al., 1998), it is predicted that what constitutes greatest HRM practices will be significantly related to employees' service-oriented OCB.Thus, the selection of HRM practices in this research are mainly based on ERG's theory of motivation.According to Alderfer (1972), ERG theory is conceptualized three elements of human needs (existence, relatedness, growth) that employees attempt to satisfy in their organizations.Thus, salary or monetary rewards are categorised as employee's physiological needs for existence; job security is categorised as employee's safety needs for existence; training and development is categorised as employee's needs for growth and supervisor support is categorised as employee's need for relatedness in the organization.Therefore, in this research proposed four HRM practices (training and development; pay practice; job security and supervisor support) based on ERG's theory of motivation that may foster greater levels of service-oriented OCB.

Pay Practice
According to Parker and Wright (2001), money has the potential to influence employee's attitude and behaviour.Pay practice generally refers to a reward system including basic salary, performance pay and allowances that organization paid for their employees (Byars & Rue, 2004).The HRM of organizations were paid differently for the same job to certain employees based on employee's individual differences in responsibility, working experience, job performance, education qualification and as well as seniority of employee (Bateman & Snell, 2007;Cherrington, 1995).
Appropriate pay practice in the organization may develop employees to increase their performance, motivation and productivity (Milgrom & Roberts, 1992).The use of an appropriate pay practice in organization suggest that employee's capabilities, performance and effort contributions are appreciated and recognized (Chew & Chan 2008;Davies, 2001).Hence, this could lead to higher commitment and satisfaction amongst employees.According to expectancy theory (Vroom, 1964), when employees received a satisfied pay, they more likely to increase their contribution in working hard to increase the OCB of individual which will lead to improve the service quality of the organization.Past study based on expectancy theory shows that pay practice positively influences employee's OCB (Van Scotter, 2000).According to Konovsky and Pugh (1994), OCB is a positive behaviour of an employee to the organization and pay practice will have positive influence on OCB as well as job involvement in an organization.Besides that, other past studies on OCB found that pay practice is significantly affect employee's OCB in organization (Frye, 2004;Huselid, 1995;Teseema & Soeters, 2006).
In addition, pay practice based on performance and allowances will further increase employee performance (Brown, Sturman & Simmering, 2003;Delaney & Huselid, 1996).Collins and Clark (2003) stated that most of the organizations used performance and allowance based pay practice to reward employees and it's positively effects employee's OCB.Thus, pay practice makes employees well motivated to go further their call of job responsibilities in the form of higher service-oriented OCB.Hence, the following hypothesis is proposed: Hypothesis 1: Employees' pay practice will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.

Job Security
Job security is the degree of an employee expects to stay or work in the organization for a longer period of time (Delery & Doty, 1996).Besides that, Simon (2011) stated that job security influences the probability of employee keeping his or her job without the risk of becoming unemployed.Furthermore, necessary or essential skills, job knowledge, and past working experience needed by the organizations; and subject to the current business environment and current economic condition also secure employee's job security (Pfeffer, 1998).
Employees have time to focus on the tasks at hand and getting their job done perfectly when employees feel their jobs are secure.Job security has a positive influence with employee performance in an organization (James, 2012).According to James (2012), employees with low job security are losing faith with their organization which consequently affects their performance in an organization.Thus, employees with high job security are highly contribute themselves in the job to perform their task effectively.Job security reduces employees' risk of job sacking during an economic crisis and creates a good relationship of trust between employees and the organization.

Training and Development
Training and development practices of an organization indicates forms of human capital investment for organizational and employees improvements (Wentland, 2003).The study from U.S. Department of Labor (1993) shows that training and development practices have been shown to be significant elements of efficient performance in the organization (Terpstra & Rozell, 1993).The previous study from Russia proved that training and development opportunities gives an organization the competitive advantage (Jukov & Korotov, 1998;Shekshnia, 1998).According to Dessler (2008), training and development practices are developing employee's skills and abilities to perform well on their job in organization.Hence, the results from previous researches shows that training and development programs positively influence employee's performance in organization (Delaney & Huselid, 1996;Koch & McGrath, 1996).Besides that, providing training and development programs are influence employees to receive necessary skills, knowledge and attitudes to function responsibly (Guest, 2000).Thus, employees who have attend more training and development programs are likely to perform better.
Several past studies have been conducted on the influences of training and development on employee's attitude and behaviour and the results indicate that training and development positively influence the employee's OCB in an organization (Ashill, Carruthers & Krisjanous, 2006;Tsaur & Lin, 2004;Tang & Tang, 2012).Besides that, a study from Aizzat et al. (2012) explained that customer-contact employees are expected to become highly motivate and willing to involve themselves in service-oriented behaviours that exceed their formal job through training and development.Thus, training and development would develop greater service-oriented OCB amongst employees.Another past studies show that, training and development program help new employees adapt themselves to early entry experiences resulting in lower feeling of uncertainty (Autry & Wheeler, 2005;Simosi, 2010;Van Maanen & Schein, 1979).In such situation, new employees are more interested to become committed to the work which makes them to engage in behaviour such as service-oriented OCB.Hence, the following hypothesis is proposed: Hypothesis 3: Employees' training and development will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.

Supervisor Support
According to Griffin, Patterson & West (2001), supervisor support is defined as the extent of supervisors care about their employee's well-being and values their employee's contribution in the organization.Supervisor is a representative of the organization that have responsibility to guide and evaluate performance of the employees (Eisenberger, Stinglehaumber, Vandenberghe, Sucharski & Rhoades, 2002).Moreover, employees perceived the care that received from supervisors and they make common perceptions on the amount of their organizations gives value to their contributions and also take care of their benefits and well-being (Eisenberger, Huntington & Huchison, 1986).The strength of the relationship is also dependent on which level employees perceived the relation with their supervisor (Eisenberger et al., 2002).
Past studies found that supervisor support from the supervisor can develop employee's good perception of the organization and acceptance of the organization's values and goals among employees (Rhoades, Eisenberger, & Armeli, 2001).Besides that, a past study results shows that higher supervisor support can improve employee's performance of OCB in the organization (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, 2000).The results were explained that leader member exchange influenced trust of employees significantly and improved perceived supervisor support within employees.This makes employees to perform greater OCB in their organization.Furthermore, Mayer and Gavin (2005) showed that employee's trust with supervisor build a positive relationship amongst employees.Thus, these lead employees commit more to their organizations and more likely to feel satisfied which in turn lead to greater service-oriented OCB.Hence, the following hypothesis is proposed: Hypothesis 4: Employees' supervisor support will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.

Overall HRM Practices
Previous literatures linking HRM practices to employee's attitude and behaviour suggested that an integrated set or overall perception of HRM practices has a greater effect on performance rather than HRM practices taken individually (Dyer & Reeves, 1995;Koon, 2014;Ramsay, Scholarios, & Harley, 2000).On the basis of the preceding discussion and from the perspective of social exchange (Blau, 1964), it can be expected that customer-contact employees' overall perceptions of their telecommunications and internet service provider's HRM practices (training and development, pay practice, job security, supervisor support) will significantly and positively affect their service-oriented OCB.Hence, the following hypothesis is proposed: Hypothesis 5: Employees' overall perception of HRM practices will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.

Methodology
The main objective of this research is to determine the relationship between HRM practices and service-oriented OCB.The unit of analysis for this study is at the individual level, which is the customer-contact employee that working in telecommunication and internet service providers in Malaysia.Simple random sampling method was used to select respondents for this study.Simple random sampling was used in this research in order to avoid bias and to ensure that each customer-contact employee working in telecommunications and internet service providers had an equal chance of being selected.In total 204 completed questionnaires were collected from target respondents and a response rate is 81.60%.Self-administered questionnaire was used as an instrument for data collection in this study.Werner and Eleanor (1993) suggested that self-administered questionnaire that distributed by hand is most suitable method of data collection in a research.
A quantitative descriptive survey method was used in this research.The questionnaire was categorised into Section A and Section B. Thus, Section A consists of target questions and Section B consists of age, gender, marital status, nationality, race, religion, education level, monthly income and working experience.All items used in the questionnaire were based on a five-point Likert scale ranged from "Strongly Disagree" with the value of one to "Strongly Agree" with the value of five in this study.
The collected data were analysed using the computerized Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software (Buglear, 2005).Preliminary analyses were conducted to test the goodness of data and regression statistical analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses for this research (Sekaran, 2011).The factor analysis was conducted to address the problem of analysing the structure of the interrelationship among a large number of variables.Besides that, Cronbach's alpha was calculated to measure reliability scale for each variable which indicate how consistent the responses were across items within the scale.Correlation analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between HRM Practices and service-oriented OCB.Furthermore, regression analysis was applied to analyse the effect of HRM practices on service-oriented OCB.

Demographic Characteristics
Total 204 Malaysian respondents were included in this study.Table 1 shows the frequency and percentage of each group related to demographic factors.

Factor Analysis
Factor analysis is used to organise the concealed structure within the collected respondents and to arrange the number of indicators into a more well-organised and manageable set of data (Harman, 1976).In this study, two factor analyses as shown in Table 2 were conducted to verify the hypothesized dimensionality of the independent and dependent variables respectively.In factor analysis, a forced choice procedure was chosen for the number of extracted factors with VARIMAX rotation.The results of this research show that the KMO (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin) value for all variable are above 0.5.Furthermore, Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant for all variables of this study.Besides that, all variables of this this study had Eigenvalues more than 1.Primary factor loading for each item in a variable is required to have minimum 0.4 and above (Coakes and Steed, 2003).In this study, the items for each variable had primary factor loadings of 0.4 and above, and proved that it met the acceptable standard of factor analysis.The minimum acceptance criteria of reliability are the Cronbach's alpha value must be more than 0.6 (Sekaran, 2011).In this study, the result of reliability analysis indicated that the value of Cronbach alpha of each variable met the acceptable standard of reliability analysis.All the variable's Cronbach alpha of this study fall between 0.93 and 0.97.Sekaran (2011), the bivariate correlations is a statistical method that used to determine the relationship between independent variables and dependent variable.Correlation analysis used in this study to determine relationship between HRM practices (pay practice, job security, training and development, supervisor support) and service-oriented OCB.The results in Table 3 show that correlation between pay practice (r 1 = 0.61), job security (r 2 = 0.64), training and development (r 3 = 0.65) and supervisor support (r 4 = 0.60) are significant for the service-oriented OCB.

Hypotheses Testing
The regression analysis was used to determine the effect of HRM practices (pay practice, job security, training and development, supervisor support) and perception of overall HRM practices on service-oriented OCB.Table 4 shows that the HRM practices statistically predict the service-oriented OCB, F(4,199) = 69.67,p<0.01 and perception of overall HRM practices also statistically predict the service-oriented OCB, F(1,202) = 251.55,p<0.01.Coefficient correlation (R value) for this models are 0.76 and 0.75.These values show that HRM practices and overall HRM practices has positive relationship with service-oriented OCB.The R 2 values indicate HRM practices can explain 58% (0.58) and overall HRM practices can explain 56% (0.56) of variations in the service-oriented OCB.This shows that both of these regression models are good fit for the data.The regression results in Table 4 show that of the five hypothesized relationships, four (job security, training and development, supervisor support) are significant (p<0.05) and one (pay practice) is non-significant (p>0.05).
Firstly, Hypothesis 1 suggests that employees' pay practice will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.
However, the regression results show that non-significant effect with service-oriented OCB (t= 0.54, p=0.59).This study is counter to early study by Chew and Chan (2008); Davies (2001); and Parker and Wright (2000).Thus, this result shows that further analysis is needed to determine the potential moderating and mediating factors that effects the direct relationship between pay practice and service-oriented OCB.
Secondly, Hypothesis 2 suggests that employees' job security will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.The regression results for job security are significantly support the relationship with service-oriented OCB (t= 5.09, p<0.01).This finding is consistent with the previous studies by (Pfeffer, 1998;Sun & Pan, 2008) that found job security has a positive significant effect with service-oriented OCB.
Next, Hypothesis 3 suggests that employees' training and development will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.The regression results for training and development have support this hypothesis (t= 6.09, p<0.01).This finding is consistent with past studies indicating that training and development programs provided by the organization were increased the employee's performance.In other word, training and development program is important for service-oriented OCB (Ashill et al., 2006;Tang & Tang, 2012).
Fourth, Hypothesis 4 suggests that employees' supervisor support will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.The regression results indicate a positive significant relationship between supervisor support and service-oriented OCB in this study (t= 2.88, p<0.01).Based on this finding, previous literature also has consistently shown that supervisor support has a positive and significant effects on service-oriented OCB (Griffin et al., 2001;Rhoades et al., 2001).
Lastly, Hypothesis 5 suggests that employees' overall perception of HRM practices will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.In line with the results of past studies, the results of this study show that overall perception of HRM practices has a positive and significant effects on service-oriented OCB (Dyer & Reeves, 1995;Ramsay et al., 2000).The regression results for overall perception of HRM practices have supported in this study (t= 15.86, p<0.01).Based on the statistical analysis above, the supported and not supported proposed hypotheses of this study are shown in Table 5.

H1
Employees' pay practice will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.Not Supported H2 Employees' job security will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.Supported H3 Employees' training and development will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.Supported H4 Employees' supervisor support will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.Supported H5 Employees' overall perception of HRM practices will be significantly effect on service-oriented OCB.Supported

Implications
This research can help the service-oriented management by providing additional information about the influences of HRM practices toward service-oriented OCB.Thus, the results of this study could be a determinant to service-oriented organizations making more reliable decisions on the planning process in HRM matters in their organizations.
First, this study shows that pay practice has non-significant effect on employee's service-oriented OCB.However, the previous findings indicate that pay practice has a positive significant impact on the employee's performance (Chew & Chan, 2008;Davies, 2001;Parker & Wright, 2000).The finding of this study for pay practice indicates that non-consistent results with previous studies.Thus, further investigation is needed to determine the potential moderating and mediating factors that effects the direct relationship between pay practice and service-oriented OCB.
Second, this study shows that employee's job security has a positive significant effect on employee's service-oriented OCB.The managements of telecommunication and internet service provider should have agreement with customer-contact employees regarding employment contract.An employment contract is defined as written legal document that described about terms and conditions of an employment relationship between organization and employee (Susan, 2016).The organization should clearly have described about employee's job protection in employment contract.Thus, this could help customer-contact employees to stay longer period and perform well on their service-oriented OCB in organization.
Third, this study also shows that training and development has a positive significant effect on employee's service-oriented OCB.The management should conduct adequate pre-training to their new customer-contact employees on how to perform well good service to their customers in order to increase employee's service-oriented OCB.
Fourth, supervisor support in this study also shows positive effect on employee's service-oriented OCB.Thus, the management should implement awareness program to supervisors regarding employee's cares.This could help supervisors to improve themselves to care and value their customer-contact employee's contributions.Hence, supervisor support from the supervisor can develop employee's good perception of the organization and enhance employee's performance of service-oriented OCB.
Lastly, one of the major implication in this study is overall perception of HRM practices on employee's service-oriented OCB.The overall HRM practices positively influence employee's service-oriented OCB in this study.Thus, Ministry of Human Resources (MOHR) and other Malaysian government agencies should build better awareness of the benefits of HRM practices to motivate higher rate of retention of the customer-contact employees in the telecommunication and internet's service organizations.The awareness can be done by having induction and seminar sessions on benefit of HRM practices to allow telecommunications and internet service providers to evaluate their customer-contact employee's service-oriented OCB.

Conclusion
Based on the results of this research, three HRM practices (training and development, job security, supervisor support) did have positive effect towards employee's service-oriented OCB with the exception for pay practice variable.The pay practice on this study will not likely to influence the employee's service-oriented OCB in Malaysian telecommunications and internet service providers.The results for pay practice suggest to conduct further analysis to determine the potential moderating and mediating factors that effects the direct relationship between pay practice and service-oriented OCB.Finally, the overall perception of HRM practices in this study shows that HRM practices positively influence customer-contact employee's service-oriented OCB.From the results of this study, it can be concluded that objective of this study was achieved, which is to study about the influence of HRM practices on service-oriented OCB in the context of telecommunication and internet service providers in Malaysia.

Table 1 .
Profile of Respondents

Table 2 .
Factor Analysis

Table 3
is shows that Means, Standard Deviation (SD) and Bivariate Correlations of the variables.According to

Table 4 .
Multiple Regression Analysis