The role of work engagement in promoting service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior

Service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (SO-OCB) is a form of the extra- role behavior performed by service employees when delivering services to customers. SO-OCB includes three dimensions, which are loyalty, service delivery and participation. In the context of private hospitals, nurses representing the hospital to deliver services to patients and nurses have the most frequent interaction with patients. Therefore, SO-OCB exhibited by nurses is imperative in warranting the outstanding service quality of the private hospitals. This study aims to examine the mediation role of work engagement between organizational resources (training, performance appraisal, and empowerment), social resources (co-worker support and patient cooperation) and SO-OCB among nurses in private hospitals. The sample of this study was nurses in Malaysian private hospitals. A total of 30,335 nurses working in 137 private hospitals in Malaysia were invited to participate in this study. However, only 15 private hospitals agreed to participate in this study. Hence, 345 nurses were involved in this study and 345 set of questionnaires were distributed. Of that, 324 set questionnaires were returned and 318 set of questionnaires were usable. Statistical Package for Social Sciences 22.0 (SPSS) and Partial Least Squares 2.0 (PLS) were used to analyse the data. The findings indicate that work engagement mediates all the hypotheses except the relationship which hypothesized between training and SO-OCB. Based on findings, suggestions and limitations of the study were put forward.