Impact of Pay (Transactional Psychological Contract) on Organizational Citizenship Behavior in the Nigerian Banking Industry: The Moderating Role of Leader–Member Exchange
Abstract
Employees’ willingness to engage in discretionary behaviors that benefit their organization’s is shaped by the psychological contracts they form with employers. In the Nigerian banking industry, performance and organizational survival increasingly depend on employees’ readiness to go beyond formal job descriptions by helping co‐workers, volunteering for additional tasks and demonstrating loyalty to the organization. This paper extracts, refines and extends part of a doctoral thesis examining how transactional psychological contract fulfilment, conceptualized as pay—predicts multiple dimensions of organizational citizenship behavior among bank workers in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Drawing on social exchange theory, the study theorize that employees reciprocate perceived pay fulfilment through altruism, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, courtesy and civic virtue, and that the quality of leader–member exchange moderates these relationships. Using survey data from 384 bankers analyzed through descriptive statistics, reliability tests and regression analyses, we show that pay explains small but significant proportions of variance in all five OCB dimensions, with beta coefficients ranging from 0.147 to 0.209 and R2 values between 3.6 % and 4.9 %. Our discussion situates these findings within contemporary literature on psychological contracts and extra‐role behavior. The paper concludes by suggesting managerial implications for pay policies and leadership quality and highlights avenues for future research.
References
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