Research Instruments

A structured questionnaire was used in this study (as in Appendix 1), which comprised of five sections. Section (1) items asked for personal information from the respondents. It also checks respondents’ knowledge about the issues investigated in this study to ensure that they possess the required knowledge to respond to the issues asked (Slater & Atuahene-Gima, 2004). Section (2) items examined the service employees’ job satisfaction. Section (3) items addressed the front line employees’ perception towards the organization service orientation. Section (4) items measured the respondents’ service commitment. Section (5) of the questionnaire examined the front line employees’ service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviour. A covering letter regarding this study was provided by the researcher on the first page of the questionnaire. The purpose of the covering letter was to introduce the purpose of the study and the eligibility of the respondents and to provide assurance of confidentiality of their responses.

The following section describes the research variables, questionnaire, and sources of the adapted instruments chosen in this study. The measures were mostly adapted from previous studies with acceptable reliabilities (Cronbach’s alphas). These measures have been widely used in several studies, as shown in Table 3.2.

3.4.1 Employee Job Satisfaction (JS)

As stated earlier, for the purpose of this research, employees’ job satisfaction is defined as an employee's overall affective evaluation of the intrinsic and extrinsic facets of the job. Employee job satisfaction in this study is referring to the service

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employees’ job satisfaction. In this study, a job satisfaction was therefore developed based on the Hayday (2003) job satisfaction measurement that has 23 items. JS was measured using sixteen items adapted and slightly modified from the Hayday (2003) in order to fit the context of the study.

A six-point Likert scale ranging from (1) “extremely disagree” to (6) “extremely agree” was employed. The Cronbach alpha value for JS from previous study was 0.949 (Noble & Mokwa, 1999). The Cronbach alpha for all the variables of this study (pilot as well as the real test) is shown in Table 3.2 below.

Table 3.2

Source and description of all the study variable measures

3.4.2 Organization Service Orientation (OSO)

In this study, OSO is defined as an organization wide embracement of a basic set of relatively enduring organizational policies, practices and procedures intended to support and reward service-giving behaviours that create and deliver service excellence (Lytle, Hom & Mokwa, 1998). OSO was measured using 15 items adapted

Section Variable Number of items

Reliability Sources of scale

Pilot Test Real Test

1 Personal information 9 - - Self-construct 2 Service employees’ job satisfaction 16 0.89 0.92 Hayday (2003) 3 Organization service orientation 15 0.87 0.91 Lytle et al., 1998 4 Service employees commitment

16 0.87 0.87 Meyer, Allen and Smith (1993) 5 Service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviour 12

0.95 0.90 Bettencourt et. al., (2001)

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and slightly modified from Lytle et al., (1998). A six-point Likert scale ranging from (1) “extremely disagree” to (6) “extremely agree” was employed. The Cronbach alpha value for OSO from previous study was 0.949 (Lytle et al., 1998).

3.4.3 Service Employee Commitment (SEC)

The SEC scale consisted of sixteen items taken from Meyer, Allen and Smith (1993) appropriately reworded to fit the context of the study. A six-point Likert scale ranging from (1) “extremely disagree” to (6) “extremely agree” was employed. The Cronbach alpha value for SEC from previous study was 0.945 (Meyer, Allen & Smith, 1993).

3.4.4 Service-oriented Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (SO-OCB)

For this study, SO-OCB was measured using 12 items adapted from Bettencourt et al., (2001). A six-point Likert scale ranging from (1) “extremely disagree” to (6) “extremely agree” was employed. The reliability coefficients (cronbach alpha) from previous research was 0.82 (Bettencourt et al., 2001).

3.4.5 Scale Type Used

One of the most common scaled-response format questions in survey design today is the Likert scale. It was developed by the American educator and organizational psychologist Rensis Likert in 1932 as an attempt to improve the levels of measurement in social research through the use of standardized response categories in survey questionnaires. The Likert scale is regarded as one of the primary methods in

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measuring respondent attitudes. One advantage of this scale is that it can produce scales that have good reliability and validity (Bearden & Netemeyer, 1999; Churchill & Peter, 1984). A six (6) point Likert scale will be used to measure the items stated in section two to section five. Based on the findings of Chomeya (2010), a six (6) point Likert scale was chosen in this study because of the following reasons:-

i. The Likert’s scale 6 points tend to give the discrimination and reliability values which are higher than the Likert’s scale 5 points. If the researchers wanted to emphasize the discrimination and reliability high, therefore, the Likert’s scale 6 points should be used.

ii. In order to reduce the deviation to be the least or reduce the risks which might happened from the deviation of personal decision making, the Likert’s scale 6 points instead of Likert’s scale 5 points should be chosen. iii. Likert’s scale 6 points is appropriate to the research which has several

variables because it will make the test as a whole has the numbers of items not to many and it will not be the burden of the respondents while the reliability is acceptable according to the standard of psychological test

This type of scale is also chosen in accordance with Allen and Rao (2000) who claim that wider distributions of score used in a scale, offer a stronger discriminating power. They further affirm that the wider the distribution of the score, the easier it is to establish covariance between two variables with greater dispersion about their means. Hence, all questions in this study measured the agricultural service employees’ level of agreement towards a given statement with the scale anchored from one (1) “extremely disagree” to six (6) “extremely agree”.

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3.4.6 Pre-Test Procedures

Sekaran and Bougie, (2010) and Babbie (2005) suggest that a pre-test of questionnaire is useful to ensure that there is no problem with wording or scales used in the questionnaire. Hence, a pre-test allows a researcher to have a feel for the reliability and validity of the final questionnaire before sample data collection is carried out. To examine the validity and reliability of the questionnaire, a pre-testing of the questionnaire were conducted.

The first pre-testing involved a panel of six faculty members from the School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, to review the design of the questionnaire which include the layout, wording, sequencing as well as languages used. Among others, this process emphasized the face validity or content validity of the questionnaire. The panels were selected based on their expertise and knowledge in the management field. The outcome of the pre-test resulted in some minor modifications in the questionnaire.

The second pre-test, which is the pilot test, involved 60 service employees who were randomly selected from the staff directory of the three departments. These employees were removed from the respondent data list during the real test. Reliability test was conducted to refine the questionnaire and the results indicated that all the construct measurements fulfilled the minimum requirement (Cronbach Alpha = 0.65 to 0.70) of reliability test (Nunnaly, 1978), then these questions were used in the final test. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), however, was conducted in the final stage of data analysis to examine the constructs for validity. Two types of construct validity were assessed in this study, namely, convergent validity and discriminant validity. Common method variances assessment using Harman’s one single factor test was conducted to assess issues with self-reporting bias.

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