Perceptions of Organizational Politics and Employees’ Performance; An Integrative Model of Pakistani Worksites

Abstract

Organizational Politics is an integral part of every organization whether small or large, public or private. This phenomenon varies in the degrees of its use from person to person and context to context. Thus perceptions of reality are more important than reality itself. The study in hand is an effort to investigate what affects do these perceptions have on different employees’ outcomes in Pakistani organizations. This is prime effort to investigate the relationship of perceived organizational politics with various outcomes through mixed method design and focusing on mechanisms or processes rather than bivariate relationships. The data was collected from nationwide sample through self administered questionnaires in quantitative phase and semi structured interviews in qualitative phase concurrently. Self administered questionnaires were distributed to part time management students who were working in different organizations of Pakistan during their day schedule and take their classes in evening. Overall 1360 questionnaires were distributed from which 1163 working surveys were received which make about response rate equals to 85.51%. Qualitative data were collected through semi structured interviews from six executives working in different industries. Participation in survey and interview was voluntary while confidentiality and anonymity were ensured. For analysis purpose, quantitative data were coded and entered into SPSS 20 and interviews were transcribed in NVivo 10. Structural Equation Modeling was applied for measurement model and structural model for the purpose of hypotheses testing in AMOS 18. Supplemental tests for mediation and interactions were run for cross validation in SPSS 20 through regression analysis. The results strongly supported the proposed model and hypotheses thus establishing evidence from comparatively very large national level sample. There were also some exploratory findings which have been discussed in details. Guidelines for future research are also provided.