Job satisfaction, academic motivation, and organizational citizenship behavior among lecturers during the COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-national comparative study in Japan and Malaysia

Job satisfaction and its antecedents and outcomes are important areas of focus in the social sciences research, and higher education is no exception. The importance of this issue has grown during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, using a cross-national study conducted in Malaysia and Japan, we collected data on lecturers’ job satisfaction and two of its outcomes, namely, academic motivation and individual-level organizational citizenship behavior (OCBI) to test our evidence-based theoretical model, which explains the relationships between these variables. We also added age, gender, and tenure as covariates to our model. Our partial least squares structural equation modeling estimation results at the aggregate and country levels showed that the effect of job satisfaction on OCBI was mainly transmitted through academic motivation. We also observed that Malaysian and Japanese lecturers did not show a statistical difference in terms of the relationships described between the variables in our model. Additionally, the relationship between academic motivation and OCBI was nonlinear based on the data from the Malaysian sample, and we explained this phenomenon from both theoretical and practical/policy perspectives. Moreover, our results showed that age plays an important role in the model when it is estimated using data from the Malaysian higher education system. We discussed our findings in detail in terms of theoretical and practical implications.