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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of employment status on service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of customer contact employees. The authors also investigate the mediating roles of internal mobility opportunity and job insecurity in the relationship between employment status and service-oriented OCB.

A survey methodology was used and data were collected from a dyad-sample of 270 employees and their supervisors of one retail and one banking companies in Taiwan. Product-of-coefficients approach and bootstrapping were used to test the multiple mediating model.

The results demonstrate that temporary employment related negatively to service-oriented OCB. Moreover, both internal mobility opportunity and job insecurity mediated the employment status – service-oriented OCB linkage.

This study has three limitations. First, this study examined only fixed-term direct-hire temporary employees. Future research should explore voluntary job behaviors of different categories of temporary employment to confirm the results of the present study. Second, this study examined internal mobility opportunity and job insecurity as two mediators. Other alternative avenues may exist by which employment status may lead to service-oriented OCB. Future research may explore additional possible mediators. Finally, the participants of this study were selected by the human resource departments of the participating companies. This option could have introduced selection bias in this study.

This study suggests that management should be aware of why temporary customer contact employees have lower levels of service-oriented OCB. As service-oriented OCB may be vital for organizational success in the service context, management must consider the benefits and costs when hiring temporary employees. Moreover, management can motivate temporary employees to display higher service-oriented OCB by shaping their expectations of internal mobility possibilities, or reducing temporary employees’ perception of job insecurity to enhance their service-oriented OCB.

This study makes two contributions. First, this study extends the effect of employment status in the OCB literature by investigating the relationship between employment status and service-oriented OCB for customer contact employees. The results of the present study lend support for the partial exclusion theory to predict that socially excluded group (i.e. temporary employees) tends to be less engaged in service-oriented OCB. Second, this study contributes to the literature by investigating two important links (i.e. internal mobility opportunity and job insecurity) to explain why temporary employment may lead to lower service-oriented OCB.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships among role stressors, social support, and employee deviance. Specifically, this study explores the relationships of role stressors (i.e. role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload) to interpersonal and organisational employee deviance. Furthermore, this study examines the moderating role of social support (from supervisors and coworkers) on the above relationships.

Data were collected from 326 paired samples of sales and customer service employees as well as their immediate supervisors in Taiwan.

Role conflict had a positive relationship with both organisational and interpersonal deviance. Role ambiguity was positively, while role overload was negatively related to organisational deviance, respectively. Role ambiguity was more strongly related to organisational than to interpersonal deviance. Coworker support had a significant moderating effect on the role overload – interpersonal deviance relationship.

Organisations may implement policies and programs, such as clarification of job responsibility, provision of performance feedback and training in stress coping techniques, to lessen the negative effect of role conflict, and role ambiguity on employee deviance.

This study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, this study extends prior research on stressor-performance relationship by investigating the effect of role stressors on two forms of employee deviance (interpersonal deviance and organisational deviance) in a collectivist cultural context (i.e. Taiwan). Second, this study demonstrates that work-related characteristics (e.g. role stressors) have different degrees of effect on interpersonal and organisational deviance. Third, this research offers explanations on why there is little support for the moderating effect of social support on the stressor-deviance relationship.