The Podsakoff & MaxKenzie (1994) scale has three subscales and Helping was described as the most useful with an alpha reliability estimate of 0.89 for those four (?) items alone.

Hi Bishakha,

You may please refer my Review Paper on RG. Perhaps you may get the requisite information. 

Thanks Patricia. I am looking for a global measure and am not particular about its dimensions. 

Hello Bishakha:

A very good review of the OCB literature was published by Organ and his colleagues. Here is the reference:

Organ, D. W., Podsakoff, P. M., & MacKenzie, S. B. (2006). Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Its Nature, Antecedents, and Consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

In their appendix, these authors review a number of OCB measures. I checked, but did not see an inventory that was under nine items. However, if you were to measure only 1-2 dimensions of OCB, you could get put together a fairly brief inventory by using this appendix as you guide.

-- Russell

Hi!

There are several ways in which OCB has been measured in the literature. One of the most popular measurement scales, initially developed by Smith, Organ, and Near (1983), had 16 items and has been adapted over time by subsequent researchers. This is a global measure. Lambert and Hogan's (2013) eight item scale out of the 16 items of the Smith et al. (1983) scale is also a global one. Bettencourt et al., (2001) used 5 items as follows:

1. Tells outsiders this is a good place to work.

2. Says good things about organization to others.

3. Generates favorable goodwill for the company.

4. Encourages friends and family to use firm's products and services.

5. Actively promotes the firm's products and services.

So it really depends which dimension/ global measure of OCB you want to measure. For a fuller treatment, see Qureshi, H. (2015). A Study of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) and its Antecedents in an Indian Police Agency (Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati). Available at https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:ucin1445342158

For the OCB-C is there any scale that tell you how many items rated for the 5 subfacets of the OCB-C by spector and fox? For instance how many items rate altruism? How many items rate civic virtue, etc?

Organ (1988) argued in their literature that OCB consist on five dimensions as altruism (serving colleagues), conscientiousness (completing a remarkable activity in one's job), courtesy (being thoughtful to colleagues), sportsmanship (not whining about little burdens in the work environment) and civic virtue(remaining up on organization approaches).

I wonder why you need fewer than 9 items? Which dimension of OCB are you looking for? Depending on the dimension (or even the whole construct) the number of items could change. Besides, the new scale, if you want to construct it, must be validated by pilot testing or a dry run and looking at its unidimensionality and factor loadings.