“Effect of strategic leadership capabilities on the development of organizational citizenship behavior”

Committed employees always demonstrate their organizational citizenship behavior by offering services beyond their leaders’ expectations. They achieve their goals under the leadership of executives with the capabilities to guide the organization to the future. This study examines the impact of strategic leadership capabilities on organizational citizenship behavior in companies offering mobile services in Zimbabwe. To collect data, a survey research method is employed using a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire. Ninety-four questionnaires were randomly distributed to employees of three mobile service providers and a sector regulator in Harare province, Zimbabwe. Eighty-seven questionnaires were completed and returned. Data analysis follows a multiple regres- sion method using the IBM SPSS v27 software to test hypotheses. The study also em-ploys the Sobel test to investigate the mediation effect of organizational commitment on organizational citizenship behavior. Regression model results show that strategic leadership capabilities have a significant effect on organizational citizenship behavior. They further have a statistically significant effect on organizational citizenship behavior through organizational commitment. The results suggest that strategic leaders in the mobile phone sector in Zimbabwe should develop and strengthen strategic leadership capabilities to drive the commitment of their employees to encourage the development of organizational citizenship behavior. Committed employees will offer their services beyond their call of duty.


INTRODUCTION
The success of an organization and its ability to withstand the competition depends on the commitment of its employees. It also depends on the behavior they display at their workplaces (Grego-Planer, 2019). Employees are valuable organizational assets and a source of competitive advantage. They are also the source of core competencies resident in human skills and know-how (Thompson et al., 2015). Successful organizations recruit highly qualified and skilled employees whose commitment to the success of their organizations goes beyond their employers' expectations. Gregor-Planer (2019) and Habeeb (2019) note that employees demonstrate organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) when they volunteer to do activities diligently above their employers' expectations. By so doing, employees depict themselves as bonafide citizens of their organizations. However, the strategic leadership capabilities of top leaders have a bearing on the degree of employee commitment and development of OCB in organizations. Commitment as a mediating variable depends on many determinants. Hitt et al. (2010) state that strategic leaders must have strategic lead-ership capabilities to determine performance in organizations. The strategic leadership capabilities can possibly drive commitment and OCB in organizations. Hitt and his colleagues argue that strategic leaders must be visionary, build core competencies, and make valuable strategic decisions. They further state that leaders must develop human capital, build healthy organizational culture, develop controls, and encourage ethical behavior as necessary capabilities a strategic leader must have to drive the organization forward. Hitt et al. (2013) encourage senior executives of small, medium, and large organizations to arm themselves with these capabilities to successfully steer their organizations amid the challenges of the 21 st century global economy.
In Zimbabwe, the mobile phone sector is a significant employer. The sector operates under the watchful eye of the Posts and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ). Collectively, the sector employed a total of 6,039 employees in 2019 (POTRAZ, 2019). As an active employer, the sector members must staff their organizations with highly skilled and committed employees whose organizational citizenship behavior is beyond their regular call of duty. The sector has three active members/ service providers, namely Econet, Netone, and Telecel (Masuka et al., 2016). According to Chigwende and Govender (2020) and POTRAZ (2019), the three players fiercely try to outpace each other to control the growing market, although Econet has always emerged with an upper hand. The three players have their head offices in the metropolitan province of Harare. To survive in the 21 st century global economy, the top managers of the three service providers need strategic leadership capabilities advocated by Hitt et al. (2010). However, the impact of strategic leadership capabilities on OCB in the mobile phone sector is unknown in Zimbabwe. Perhaps top managerial leaders do not value their importance and that of commitment and OCB in their organizations. Two of the three players are currently struggling, perhaps due to the lack of employee commitment and OCB. The mobile phone industry plays a significant role in shaping the Zimbabwean economy.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT
The Upper echelons theory (EUT) advocated by Hambrick and Mason (1984) states that top managerial leaders have a mandate to make valuable strategic choices. They rely on their demographic characteristics to make strategic choices to enhance organizational performance. They also rely on the developments from the environment to make strategic choices. Hambrick and Mason (1984) state that managerial assessment of the business environment is affected by their cognitive bases and values. As a result, managers rely on their characteristics to have a clear picture of the developments from the environment. Essentially, the characteristics of top managers affect the strategic decisions they make and organizational performance. According to Hambrick and Mason (1984) Developing a strategic vision is a prerogative of top strategic leaders such as CEOs, who naturally should carry ownership of it (Thompson et al., 2015). Therefore, vision is the desired future state of the business that portrays a big mental picture of what the organization intends to look like in the future (Papulova, 2014;Suranga, 2014). No wonder, Papulova (2014) insists that a vision statement must be motivational, attractive, inspiring, and challenging to drive commitment among employees to do whatever they can for the organization. Moreover, a strategic vision gives employees direction and coordinates their daily activities to operate as a team. A visionary strategic leader must recruit highly skilled and committed employees as a source of core competencies to achieve competitive advantage. Core competencies are a set of skills, specialized knowledge, and technical innovations owned by an organization (Ceglinski, 2020). They are resident in human skills and other intangible assets. They give a firm a position of superiority that competitors fail to attain (Jabbouri & Zahari, 2014; Irtaimeh, 2018). This unique position enables a firm to deliver superior performance underpinned by the delivery of quality goods and services, much to the satisfaction of its customers. A visionary strategic leader also develops valuable strategies to drive the organization forward. A strategy is an action or action plans top executives employ to move an organization to its intended destination (

DATA AND METHODOLOGY
A survey research design was employed to collect data from 94 respondents from three players in the mobile phone sector using a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the questionnaire was administered online. The sample size was selected using the simple random sampling method. Eighty-seven (87) questionnaires were returned and, as a result of data cleaning, cases with more than 15% missing observations were excluded (Field, 2018), which in total were 5. Further, six outliers were identified, and these were beyond the prescribed range [LQ -1.5*IQR, UQ3 + 1.5*IQR] (Field, 2018). In total, 11 cases were dropped resulting in a sample size of 76, and this corresponds to a response rate of 80.85%, which is greater than the minimum accepted 60% (Leedy & Ormrod, 2016). To validate the sample size used, the post hoc sample power analysis was carried out using G*Power. This was aimed at determining the achieved sample power given the resultant effect size. The achieved non-centrality parameter was λ = 11.40 [F crit (7, 68) = 2.148], and the achieved power was 0.872; and being greater than the prescribed minimum of 0.800, the results do confirm that the sample size used for this study was adequate.
Data analysis involved the use of descriptive statistics carried out in the form of measures of central tendency and dispersion. IBM SPSS v27 software was used to test the key hypotheses using the multiple regression analysis. Since the study involved testing the relationship between independent and dependent variables with a mediating varia-Source: Authors' development.

RESULTS
The results are presented in three sections. The first is the demographic section, followed by descriptive statistics and regression and mediation analyses.

Demographics
This study considered four key demographic variables such as gender, age, company and position in the company. The results are summarized in Table 1.
Males (68.4%) were generally predominating over females (31.6%), and this is reflective of the status quo, which is characterized by a male-dominated telecommunications industry in Zimbabwe, particularly in the upper echelons of management (POTRAZ, 2019). Concerning the age distribution, the modal category is middle-aged, ranging between 30-39 years of age (39.5%), followed by those between 18-29 years of age (31.6%), and then those aged between 40-49 years (26.3%), and the least being between 50-59 years (2.6%). Lastly, concerning the position, the modal category comprises the middle management (44.7%), while the second dominant group is the senior management (26.3%), and junior managers are 19.7%. By and large, the majority of respondents are from management. This puts credibility to the study findings as the responses were from people with extensive knowledge and experience regarding the subject area (Creswell, 2014).

Descriptive statistics
More specifically, the mean rating is computed as a key measure of central tendency, while the measures of dispersion are the standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis. The results are in Table 2.
None of the mean ratings was less than the midpoint, suggesting that the respondents generally concurred. Among the seven leadership capabilities, the highest rating was given to the develop-

Regression analysis
In line with the research aims outlined, the study seeks to test the following seven research hypotheses shown in Table 3. However, the study first sought to establish the direct influence of strategic leadership key capabilities on organizational commitment. Since there was more than one independent variable, the multiple linear regression analysis was considered. The key assumptions were tested, that is, residual normal-ity, multicollinearity, and auto-correlations. None of the assumptions was violated. For the normality assumption, the results are in Table 4. Given that the sample size was less than 200, the Shapiro-Wilk test was considered in place of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, which is optimal for very large samples (Wywial, 2015). For organizational commitment, W (76) = 0.780, p > 0.05 and for OCB, W (76) = 0.832, p > 0.05, meaning that the normality assumption was not violated. For the auto-correlation assumption, the Durbin-Watson test was done and from Table 5, d = 2.098 ~ 2, and this meant that the assumption was not violated (Pallant, 2013). Lastly, the multicollinearity assumption was tested using the Variance Inflated Factor (VIF). Tabachnick and Fidell (2013) and Field (2018) prescribe a maximum VIF of 5.0, and from the outcome in Table 7, the maximum observed VIF was 2.554 < 5. In this regard, the multicollinearity assumption was not violated.

Effect of strategic leadership capabilities on organizational commitment
The first research objective sought to establish the effect of strategic leadership capabilities on organizational commitment. As noted above, multiple linear regression analysis was used due to the multiple independent variables. The model summary is presented in Table 5.
The results show that the regression coefficient was 0.715, which is very high, and the regression R-squared was 0.512, meaning that all the seven independent variables explained 51.2% of the variance in the dependent variable. Overall, the model goodness-of-fit was confirmed to be valid: F (7, 68) = 10.175; p < 0.05 (Table 6). Table 7 presents the key regression coefficients for each independent variable.
The results do confirm that all the seven independent variables had a statistically significant influence on organizational commitment. The main predictor was encouraging acceptable ethical behavior (β = 0.446; p < 0.05), followed by building a healthy organizational culture (β = 0.367; p < 0.05), with the third-highest being making valuable stra-tegic decisions (β = 0.342; p < 0.05), and the fourth being building formidable core competencies (β = 0.342; p < 0.05). On the other hand, the least significant predictor was developing and instituting effective organizational controls (β = 0.283; p < 0.05), the second least being developing a motivated human resource base (β = 0.299; p < 0.05), and the third least being developing a clear strategic vision (β = 0.332; p < 0.05).

Moderation effect of organizational commitment on organizational citizenship behavior
The second research objective was to establish the moderation effect of organizational commitment on the development of organizational citizenship   behavior. Two approaches were used such as the hierarchical linear regression and the Sobel test.
Hierarchical linear regression was used to determine the extent of the influence of organizational commitment on OCB after accounting for all other variables.

Model 1:
The regression models for the strategic leadership capabilities alone were statistically significant, ∆F (7, 68) = 37.118, p < 0.05, suggesting that there was a significant relationship between the strategic leadership capabilities and OCB. The goodness-of-fit results were also statistically significant, F (7, 68) = 37.118; p < 0.05.

DISCUSSION
The results of the study show that all seven strategic leadership capabilities shown in Table 11 had a significant effect on the development of OCB in the mobile phone industry in Zimbabwe. Building core competencies was an outstanding significant predictor at β = 0.795; p < 0.05. According to Irtaimeh (2018), strategic leaders of an organiza- tion driven by well-defined core competencies are likely to create a favorable working environment that motivates subordinates to focus on achieving set objectives. Usually, trained and motivated employees feel encouraged to show off their skills with a high degree of commitment. Developing a strategic vision was the second-highest predictor at β = 0.196; p < 0.05. Suranga (2014) points out that a well-articulated vision statement enables employees to see a clear picture of the organization's direction. It makes them feel satisfied as committed citizens of the institution. Essentially, vision drives motivation when committed employees offer their services beyond managerial expectations. Making valuable strategic decisions was the third-highest predictor at β = 0.140; p < 0.05). Ajagbe et al. (2016) state that well-developed and communicated strategies drive commitment among employees and motivate them to do whatever they can for their organizations willingly as OCB develops.
The results also show a statistically significant effect of the strategic leadership capabilities on OCB through organizational commitment. Organizational commitment bonds employees with their organizations and make them feel honored as bonafide citizens of their organizations (Zayas-ortiz et al., 2014). They tend to exhibit their newly acquired behaviors by demonstrating total loyalty to their organizations.

CONCLUSION
The study aims to encourage organizational citizenship behavior among employees in the mobile phone sector to enhance performance. It also aims to motivate senior executives of mobile phones companies in Zimbabwe to have the capabilities necessary to develop such behavior. The results show that strategic leadership capabilities influence OCB development significantly through the mediating effect of organizational commitment. Conclusively, the study findings indicate that OCB can thrive among employees if top managers equip themselves with strategic leadership capabilities. Employees displaying OCB are likely to boost the performance of organizations through many activities they do willingly. The three players in the Zimbabwe mobile phone sector are likely to benefit through the activities of committed employees leading to OCB development and enhanced organizational performance. Since the mobile phone sector is a strategic employer and contributor to the economic development of Zimbabwe, its good performance will result in employment creation to boost the Zimbabwean economy. Besides, executives from other sectors of the Zimbabwean economy can benchmark best practices thanks to good performance of organizations in the mobile phone sector. The Zimbabwean economy is slowly recovering from years of suffering from hyperinflation, so performance across all sectors of the economy is not an option.