The effect of employee?s educational level on organizational citizenship behavior

Global competition have made it compulsory for many enterprises to have the abilities such as change, innovation and uniqueness in order to obtain long term success and productivity. The most important factor that will put these abilities in front is human. Human factor can only be qualified through a sound education and training. Besides, willing behavior that will be performed by the educated and qualified people has an important impact on the productivity and the future of the enterprises. In this context, the importance of organizational citizenship comes to the fore, which is not available in the formal definition of occupations but is important for an organization.The major motivation in this study is the fact that so far there has been no research detected that examines the relationship between the educational level of employees and organizational citizenship. The study aims to investigate the relation between education and organizational citizenship behavior through a questionnaire conducted at three, four and five star hotels. To serve this purpose a questionnaire was applied to 556 employees at three, four and five start hotels located in Ankara.The questionnaire administered is composed of three parts. The first part hosts the questions related to the employees and the place where the employees work at. In the second part, three are questions related to the educational level of the employees. In the third part, there are 19 statements aiming to find out the organizational citizenship behavior of the employees.In this study, using t test for independent samples and variance analyses, whether the opinions on the organizational citizenship of the participants vary according to individual and enterprise-related characteristics, their tourism education background and their in-service training status.As a result of the analyses performed, it has been concluded that participants perform conscience behavior most, a sub-dimension of the organizational citizenship behavior, and there are statistically significant differences among the sub-dimensions of gentlemanliness and membership virtue, the sub?dimension of membership virtue in tourism education background and altruism, conscientiousness and membership virtue belonging to in-service training status. Besides, it has also been concluded that female employees exert more altruistic behavior and employees at four-star hotels perform more courtesy behavior.Keywords: Education, organizational citizenship behavior, in-service education, tourism education