Is organizational commitment-job satisfaction relationship necessary for organizational commitment-citizenship behavior relationships? A Meta-Analytical Necessary Condition Analysis

Meta-analyses on the relationships of organisational commitment (OC), job satisfaction (JS) and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) have been used to assess necessity of one another by evaluating their causality through the notion of sufficiency. This study applies necessity condition analysis (NCA) on r values collected from a systematic review of the relationship between OC, JS, and OCB and tests their relations under the notion of necessity. Two meta-analyses were performed on 140 error adjusted effects reported from 70 studies which fulfilled study’s selection and inclusion criteria. Meta-analytical results provided positive and significant OC–JS (ř = 0.546) and OC–OCB (ř = 0.374) relationships. NCA scatterplot, statistics, and bottleneck analysis confirmed the necessity of OC–JS relationship for medium and high level of the desired OC–OCB relation. This study fulfilled the literature gap on the mutual relationship of OC, JS, and OCB by focusing on the notion of necessity rather than the traditional employed notion of sufficiency through a novel method that is testing necessity hypotheses through meta-analyses. For researchers, this method provides a novel approach to analyse meta-analytical data, while enabling practitioners for identifying and focusing on necessary relationships rather than diverging their energies and resources on factors that partially affect the outcomes.