سیاست های سازمانی، نگرش های شغلی، و نتایج کار: اکتشاف و پیامدهای بخش دولتی

The study aimed to promote understanding of employees' reactions to organizational politics. The relationship between perception of organizational politics, job attitudes, and several other work outcomes was examined among 303 public sector employees in Israel. Perception of organizational politics was found to have had a negative relationship with job attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction and organizational commitment), a positive relationship with intention to leave the organization (exit), and a stronger positive relationship with negligent behavior (neglect). It is suggested that public personnel will tend to react to workplace politics with negligent behavior rather than by leaving. A weak negative relationship was found between perception of organizational politics and employees' performance as reported by supervisors. Perception of organizational politics also made a unique contribution to explaining variance among the work outcomes, beyond the variance explained by job attitudes and personal variables. Several implications and recommendations for further inquiry into perception of politics in organizations, particularly in the public sector, are noted.

What is the effect of perceived politics on organizations and employees? Ispolitics a factor that improves our understanding of employees’ job attitudes,behavioral intentions, and behavior at work? What is the nature of this relationshipand what implications should be drawn from it for the public sector? Ourgoal was to further theory and knowledge on employees’ reactions to politics inpublic organizations by providing some answers to these questions, and severalunique features were indeed produced. We found main effects of OP on twovariables which have received little, if any, attention in previous studies. Thesevariables were negligent behavior and job performance. We further found thatjob attitudes mediated the relationship between OP and work outcomes.Special attention should be paid to the relatively strong relationship betweenperception of organizational politics and negligent behavior. Politics perceptionalone accounted for 5.5% of 14.7% of the explained variance in the neglect variable. These findings suggest that reactions to politics in traditional publicsystems may be more destructive-passive than destructive-active (i.e., exit). Oneway of interpreting this finding is that employees in the Israeli public sector areless willing to give up work security and tenure even if they feel that politics isall around them. Normally, they choose to respond with more passive behavior(i.e., neglect), which is less risky and does not endanger their career developmentand occupational status. Since most of the public sector does not compensate employees according to their performance at work, neglecting one’s duties or jobassignments is less dangerous than in the private sector, but at the same time itrepresents dissatisfaction with the intraorganizational atmosphere. As a result ofinternal politics, the public sector may comprise more “unsatisfied-neglectingtypes” than “unsatisfied-leaving types” of employee. If internal politics breedsnegligent behavior and obstructive organizational performance in public agencies,one should also consider the wider effect on all service recipients. When apublic sector employee neglects his/her job, organizational outcomes are damagedand the citizens are the most likely to suffer. Negligent behavior andnegative job attitudes may thus yield low-quality work outcomes and poor andineffective public services. Low efficiency of public systems threatens largepopulations and thus carries high potential damage for the society. It also reflectsa substantial obstacle to reforms in public organizations and to new trends inpublic administration (i.e., New Public Management), which endeavors to becomemore responsive and businesslike and to improve vocational skills ofpublic servants (Pollitt, 1988, 1990). Another contribution of our study is its elaboration of the relationship betweenperception of organizational politics and employees’ performance. Here a supervisorymeasure of performance was applied, and its results were collected 6months after the original survey. As far as we could find, the study of Hochwarteret al. (1997) was the only one that used such a measure to examine a relationshipbetween performance and OP. Our findings advocate such an approach anddemonstrate the potential advantages of using a separate measure of employees’performance together with job attitudes and behavioral intentions in one model. An examination of employees’ performance as a possible work outcome thatrelates to OP also adheres to the basic model of workplace politics suggested byFerris et al. (1989). We found a weak negative relationship between thesevariables, which indicates that such a relationship may exist and is worth furtherexamination. The findings also adduce a negative relationship between percep-tions of OP and both job satisfaction and organizational commitment, as mentionedin previous studies (Cropanzano et al., 1997; Drory, 1993; Ferris et al.,1996a,b). The relationship between perception of OP and other work outcomes is in linewith the theory on OP as suggested by Ferris et al. (1989) and reinforced insubsequent studies. Nonetheless, our study deserves special consideration mainlyin light of other works which examined the side effects of OP on work outcomes(Bozeman et al., 1997; Ferris et al., 1989, 1996b; Parker et al., 1995). Thesestudies could not point to any direct relationship between OP, intentions of turnover, job satisfaction, and loyalty. Instead, they suggested that control orself-efficacy mediates the OP–work outcomes relationship. Our findings, however,portray a more complex connection, suggesting that different types ofpolitics– outcomes relationships (direct and indirect) may emerge in differentsectors and cultures. The empirical support provided by Ferris et al. (1996) for anindirect relationship may hold for nonpublic or semipublicorganizations (e.g.,universities) but to a lesser degree for more traditional public structures, such as government agencies and municipalities, as tested here. This may be due to thespecific characteristics of the political game in the public sector, which involvesextraorganizational pressures from parties, interest groups, and governmentalinstitutions; these are less involved in the internal politics of nonpublic agencies.Employees’ degree of control over the political game in public organizations maybe low and less significant because of external political influences, which areusually powerful. Mediators such as control or self-efficacy which were proposedearlier may not have any effect in such organizations, while job attitudes may. In our study, organizational commitment and job satisfaction showed a mediatingeffect of the relationship between OP and work outcomes. This effect wasadditional to the independent main effect of OP on work outcomes. Hence, werecommend future examinations of direct and indirect relations as dependent inthe specific organization and sector.The personal variables which were used in this study showed some interestingrelationships with the outcome variables. First, women, highly educated employees,and those with higher incomes showed fewer intentions of neglect than otheremployees. A possible explanation is that such employees are more vulnerableand sensitive to their achievements in the organization; they are more careful andless willing to perform negligent behaviors that may risk their position and jobsecurity. Another explanation may be the level of acceptance of OP among these employees. When OP is accepted as an integral part of daily life in the workplaceemployees feel less worried and less capable of doing something about it. Theythus treat OP as something you have to put up with if you wish to stay with theorganization. This idea is supported by the theory of control and self-efficacy asmentioned early in this study. Highly educated employees were more willing toleave the organization, perhaps because they felt that other job options wereavailable to them. Naturally, low-income employees also expressed higher intentionsof exit; however, they were also those who received better from supervisors. Working better but getting fewer rewards, perhapsdue to high OP, may lead to negligent behavior and even leaving the organizationin the long run. Nonetheless, the contribution of OP to the explanation of all thework outcomes was significant and was beyond the contribution of the personalvariables. This finding implies that OP is an important variable that makes an independent contribution to the explanation of job performance, intentions of exit,and especially negligent behavior of public personnel over and above other variables.Several limitations of this study should also be mentioned. First, with theexception of performance evaluations, the design of this research was basedmainly on self-report data, which are subject to measurement biases such ascommon method error. Future research on the relationship between workplacepolitics and work outcomes would benefit from the use of more objectivemeasures. It would be especially interesting to look for the effect of workplace politics on other work outcomes, such as absenteeism, lateness, and turnover(Ferris & Kacmar, 1992), as well as performance and organizational citizenshipbehavior (Cropanzano et al., 1997; Williams & Anderson, 1991). Second, mostof our data were collected at one point in time. With the exception of jobperformance all other variables were reported by subordinates. Unfortunately,almost no study, including this one, has used a longitudinal design in regard to OP, although this would be valuable.Note also that our data were not collected in a North American setting, incontrast to most research on OP. We consider this an advantage of our study butwe are also aware that the results might be affected by cultural and structural factors unique to Israel. For example, the Israeli public sector is markedlydifferent from the American in size and responsibilities. It is also more conservativeand centralized. Since it was established, Israel has adopted a more WestEuropean model of the welfare state in which social services are broad andextensive. Services are controlled by the central government and affected bypowerful social elites (Nachmias, 1991). In contrast with the North American public sector, Israeli public agencies face continuous dilemmas of politicalinvolvement in administrative processes. This makes the public sector moresensitive to political pressures, political appointments, and involvement of interestgroups in the professional decisions of public officials. Scholars agree thatdue to its singular cultural and structural characteristics, Israeli public administrationsuffers chronically from overbureaucracy and relatively high politization in many of its units (Deri, 1993; Nachmias, 1991). In this environment perceivedpolitics is presumably higher than that in smaller organizations that are morebusinesslike and detached from external pressures of the political system. Moreover,since political behavior inside organizations, as well as outside, is subjectto cultural influences (Pfeffer, 1992) this research should be replicated in othersettings to allow better understanding of cultural implications.Beyond its limitations, this study has accomplished several goals which can be marked as making a significant contribution to the field: (1) exploring therelationship between perceptions of organizational politics, job attitudes, exit,neglect, and job performance; (2) illuminating the special role of OP in traditionalpublic systems and its implications for employees as well as for citizens/customers; (3) utilizing a non-American setting to allow a cross-cultural examinationof OP. The contribution of this study lies in its pointing to some newdirections for better explaining the relationship among workplace politics, jobattitudes, and work outcomes in the public arena.