Influence of perceived organizational politics on employees’ performance: the role of emotional intelligence and spirituality

Author: Iloka Benneth Chiemelie
Published: 27/12/2013

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Organizational politics has become a common life experience in numerous corporations across the globe (Medison et al., 1980; Gandz & Murray, 1980). This view has been supported over the year by personal experience, hunches and circumstantial evidence (Ferris & Kacmar, 1992). Organizational politics is defined by Mintzderg (1983) and Pfeffer (1992) as a term used to indicate power relations and influential tactics in workplace. As a result of the influence it can yield, the concept of organizational politics has become a recent topic of debate in modern management literatures. Most studied in this area have been done with focus on organizational politics in relations to certain outcomes and the nature and characteristics of relationship. Apart from the effects of organizational politics in organizations, it is a promising field for further studies as it is believed to be one of the existing obstacles to organizational performance (Vigoda, 2000; Kacmar & Baron, 1999).

In support to the above account is the belief by researches that organizational politics and political perceptions, influences both workers and their working environment negatively (e.g., Ferris et al., 1989; Ferris et al., 2002; Kacmar & Baron, 1999; Mayes & Allen, 1977; Porter et al., 1981). Studies have indicated that there is a negative relationship between job performance and perceived organizational politics (Witt, 1998; Kacmar et al., 1999). Job performance is generally divided into two components: in-role performance (task performance) and extra-role performance (contextual performance) (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993; Motowidlo & Van Scotter, 1994; Motowidlo et al., 1997). In-role performance refer to the outcome of the delegated tasks, while extra-role refer to the behaviour needed to support the social fabric of the organization and both are directly influenced by organizational politics (Witt et al., 2002).

As such, this paper will look to demonstrate how organizational politics influence employees’ performance. Understanding this is important because it will help organizations to understand ways to mitigate these effects and increase employee’s performance. Basically, this paper is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on understanding what organizational politics is all about, the second section will highlight how organizational politics influences employees’ performance negatively, and the last section will be to understand how these negative effects can be mitigated. Additionally, there will be a conclusion that will summarize this paper as well as citations for all works copied from other sources.

2.0 PERCEIVED ORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS AND JOB PERFORMANCE

Triggered by the studies of Burns and Stalker (1961) and Cyert and March (1963), recent organizational theories began to create a new focus normally referred to as organizational politics (Baldridge, 1971; Pettigrew, 1973; Crozier and Friedberg, 1979; Pfeffer, 1981; Mintzberg, 1983; Piercy, 1986; Ku¨pper and Ortmann, 1988; Neuberger, 1995; Elsˇik, 1997; Bogumil and Schmid, 2001; Buchanan and Badham, 2008). A number of authors employ the term of micro-politics as a means of differentiating organizational politics from its macro level view in a more advanced political scene (Neuberger, 1995, p. 14). The view of politics in organizations is that organizational decisions are the product of strategic actions of individual or group of people who adopt power and politics as a means of reaching their usually broad and conflicting goals (Pfeffer, 1981).

In Burns and Stalker’s (1961) The Management of innovation, the authors stressed on the importance of a corresponding actor-based view to the issue of organizational politics. Burns and Stalker (1961, 144 ff.) viewed organizational as a political system where members compete available resources, and use these resources for their own interest as is opposing to the functionality of the organization itself. Cyert and March (1992, p. 31) defined organization as an establishment whose boundaries are created through its “participants in a given region” – either temporal or functional. The process of creating organizational goals is usually viewed as a process of negotiation which molds the composition and general terms for functionality of the system (Cyert und March, 1992, 33 ff.). As a support to the above definition, Crozier and Friedberg (1979, p. 69) viewed the organization as a political ground that is made of different forms of political games from its members, which can take various forms to reach its set (usually selfish) goals. This implies that organizations that cannot be seen as a uniform and harmonious entities with common goals amongst its members (Mintzberg, 1983, 174 f.). As such, the general concept of organizational politics and power will be further discussed.

2.1 THE CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS

In accordance with Pfeffer (1981, p. 7), the concept of organizational politics sis made up of activities undertaken within the organization to acquire, create, and use power as well as other resources to obtain one’s preferred outcomes in a situation with prevailing uncertainties or differences in preference. In order to differentiate this concept from the functionalist view of a structured organization, Neuberger (1995, 22 ff.) made suggestion of eight components of politics as: actor perspective and action-orientation, interest, power, influence of independency, intersubjectivity, legitimacy, ambiguity and temporality of work. Although there is a much agreement about these criterions, less unity exist as to be whether these organizational spectacles can be used to explain politics in all organizations.

Positions have been created in recent literatures as answers to the above question (Elsˇik, 1997). The first position is that politics is not inbuilt in all organizational dealings, but it’s a representation of a band that exists between fully ration decision and politically biased decisions in the organization. This implies that the political nature of decisions in organizations is contained within some preconditions. Contained in the models developed by Pfeffer (1981, p. 69) and Piercy (1986, p. 201), about the degree of conflict, is that length of political decisions in allocation of resources depends on factors that are structurally defined such as the difference of interests, interdependency between political actors and scarcity of resources that is produced from mutuality of the dependency between tasks. This dependency of mutual tasks works together with organizational differentiation that is critical for surviving in complex environments (Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967, p. 4).

The second stand is that political activity is inbuilt within all interactions (Friedberg, 1995, p. 9) and thus, is an element of organizational process. Additionally, Crozier and Friedberg (1979, p. 69) adopts their common metaphor of “an entity of interconnected political games,” to define organizations. This implies that the question of to what extent a decision is political ceases to exist. Some authors see organizational rationality as only rational arguments designed to win the interest of individuals or competing groups (e.g. Neuberger, 1995). While organizational rationality is still pretty much debated, individual actors can still be considered as being influenced by bounded rationality (see Ku¨pper and Ortmann, 1988, p. 95; Cyert and March, 1992, 214 f.). The freedom of action is considered somewhat high, because organizations represent social space, and thus most actions are negotiated (Elsˇik, 1997, p. 15). As such, decision making processes in organizations are determined more by political process rather than organizational structure (see Piercy, 1986, 461 ff.) because the main objective of decision makers is to achieve their preferred goals. As political games are viewed as being inherent in certain situations and cannot be generalized (see Crozier and Friedberg, 1995, p. 88), the methodological focus can then be concluded as being qualitative.

2.2 THE CONCEPT OF POWER IN ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY

The notion of power is viewed as an important element of politics, which is the possibility to reveal one’s interest and energize it with authority (Pettigrew, 1973: 23 ff.). If there are conflicting preferences, it is power that will determine the preference that will stand (Pfeffer, 1981, p. 28). While stressing on the difficulties associated with creating a common base for defining power, Pfeffer (1981, p. 2; see also Emerson, 1962, p. 32), most definitions about power illustrates that power is the capability of a given social actor to overcome resistance in achieving its goals. Additionally, there is a commonly agreed term that the power of an individual or combination of individuals is a related concept. Power cannot be viewed as a composition per se; it is related to other actors (see Crozier and Friedberg, 1995, p. 82). It is not the absolute degree of power, rather the asymmetry of power relation and distribution of power between actors that is decisive for the enforcement of certain preferences.

In order to define the relationship between power and political conducts, Pfeffer (1981, p. 7) suggested that power is only encysting in space unless it is put into action through the use of politics. Buchanan and Badham (2008, p. 11) provided a similar view by considering power a latent capacity, and the individual must act instead of having just a base for power. As such, politics in organization is a process of power put to work, by commanding individuals to work in accordance with set conditions for the purpose of not achieving the organizational goals but achieving the goals of the power actors.

2.3 POLITICS IN THE WORKPLACE AND ITS PERCEPTION

Politics in workplace, its causes, outcomes and impact on performance has become a common study for management scientists. Some of the common definitions of organizational politics describes it as a social-influence practice in which behavior coined to increase one’s self interest (Ferris et al., 1989), or as process of organization members to use power as a means of securing self-interest or mitigating negative outcomes that will influence their credibility in the organization (Bozeman et al., 1996). Politics is a common experience in organization, as organizational process involves the division of labor, rating and appraisal which are easily influence by political activity.

Recent studies have undertaken different approaches to understand the concept of politics in the workplace. One of such approaches was to directly measure the power of organizational members and other factors that influences tactics used by supervisors, co-workers and subordinates (Kipnis et al., 1980; Somech and Drach-Zahavy, 2002; Yukle and Tracy, 1992). However, most of the studies have focused on specific aspects of organizational politics such as employees’ perception of politics in the workplace (Bozeman et al., 1996; Ferris and Kacmar, 1992; Vigoda-Gadot, 2000, 2002). Perception of politics in the workplace usually mirror how employees view the use of power and influence by other members to gain advantage and reach their interests in conflicting preferences. The higher the perception of politics, the lower the sense of fairness and equality as people with more power are in a better position to satisfy their self-interest, usually at the expense of others. Ferris and Kacmar (1992) suggested that perception of organizational politics can be used to measure the value of actual politics in the organization because:

1.      The perception of organizational politics is easier to measure than the actual politics;

2.      They are more expressive of the views of employees and behavior intention as they represent reality in the eyes of the stakeholders; and

3.      They are believed to have higher impact on the attitude and behavior of the employees than real politics.

Thus, numerous studies have specifically emerged to review the impact of political perceptions on the performance of employees (Kacmar et al., 1999; Vigoda-Gadot, 2000), turnover behaviors of employees (Bozeman et al., 1996; Randall et al., 1999), organizational citizenship behavior(Cropanzano et al., 1997; Vigoda-Gadot, 2000), and stress related outcomes of such perceptions (Vigoda-Gadot, 2002).

2.4 CONSEQUENCES OF PERCEIVED ORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS

Numerous evidences exist under the literally views to support the notion that perceived organizational politics have negative effects on organizational efficiency. Some of these negativities associated with perceived organizational politics are that it reduces the level of job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Hochwarter, 2003; Cropanzano et al., 1997; Randall et al., 1999; Witt et al., 2000), it reduces the level of organizational citizenship behavior (Randall et al., 1999) and overall organizational performance (Vigoda, 2000), and it also increases levels of negligent behavior (Vigoda, 2000). Additionally, higher levels of perceived politics in the organization results in negative psychological states like job stress and anxiety (Ferris et al., 1996; Poon, 2003; Vigoda, 2002), and exit intention from members (Bozeman et al., 2001; Poon, 2004; Randall et al., 1999). Politics will also reduce the willingness of employees to help their co-workers, as a result of lack of trust on supervision (Poon, 2006).

Miller et al. (2000) provide a comprehensive linking of the relationship between organizational politics and core employee behaviors as:

1.      A strong relationship exists between perceived organization politics and job performance on one hand, and with organizational commitment on the other hand;

2.      A moderate relationship exists between perceived organizational politics and work stress and exist intentions;

3.      There is a relatively non-significant relationship between organizational politics and job performance; and

4.      Moderating factors (such as age, cultural difference or working environment) exist as mitigations to these influenced exerted by organizational politics.

Chang et al. (2009) presented a similar meta-analysis by proving that organizational politics is complete detrimental to the survival of the organization, as it does not produce any beneficial outcomes. The findings found a linkage between higher perceived organizational politics with turnover intention, job fatigue, lower job satisfaction, lower job performance and lower level of commitment. Thus, it can be concluded that there organizational politics exert numerous forms of negativity on employees and such include a reduced level of performance on employees’ jobs.

2.5ROLE OF EMPLOYEES’ COMMITMENT ON JOB PERFORMANCE

Organizational goals and commitment has been considered as composition of desired state that guide individual’s quests (Austin and Vancouver, 1996; Meyer and Allen, 1997). The theory of organizational goals is around individuals’ intrinsic characteristics that aid working towards ambitions and attaining set goals. In recent academic literatures, organizational commitment has been descried as a psychological state which is related to specific targets, and inflames the desire for a course of action (Cooper-Hakim and Viswesvaran, 2005). Porter et al. (1974) as a strong believe in organizational goals and acceptances of these goals, with the zeal to input high efforts into the organization and desires to maintain remain with the organization. Therefore, commitment is different form motivation as it influences behavior independent of other motives and attitudes, and can result to persistence in the course of action even if it’s different from the intended motive (Meyer et al., 2004; Meyer and Herscovitch, 2001). The growing interest in organizational commitment is because it can be linked with increased productivity, low turnover, and positive relationship towards work (Cohen, 2003).

Researches have demonstrated that organizational commitment takes different psychological forms as affective, normative and continuance commitment. Affective commitment is characterized by emotional attachment to , identification with, and constant involvement in the organization, normative commitment is characterized with perceived responsible to remain in the organization, while continuance commitment deals with understanding the cost associated with leaving the organization (Meyer and Allen, 1997).

No matter the type of commitment experienced, it has been empirically proven that an employee’s level of commitment to an organization predetermines his level of performance. This is because, employees that are committed fell a greater sense of fulfillment and job satisfaction, thus are more likely to be commitment to their work as a way of demonstrating their level of satisfaction with the way things are going in the organization. For this paper, this conceptualization will be adopted. Which implies that employees’ level of commitment directly influence their productivity in an organization.

2.6EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IN WORKPLACE

As is noticeable with most organizational concepts, different views exist in the management literature for the concept of emotional intelligence. For example, the relationship between job performance and emotional intelligence was meta-analyzed by Van Rooy and Viswesvaran (2004, p. 72). They defined emotional intelligence as a combination of qualities (verbal and non-verbal) that help a person to create, recognize, express, understand, and examine their own emotions and the emotions of other people, in order to guide reasoning and actions that are coined to cope with environmental pressures. However, most academicians in the field of management tend to agree with Salovey and Mayer’s (1990) definition of emotional intelligence as the ability of an individual to monitor their emotions and other people’s emotions, and use gained information from such monitoring to guide thinking and actions. In accordance with certain scholars (e.g. johnson and Indvik, 1999; McGarvey 1997), the more rich an organization is in terms of emotions, the more their employees’ emotional intelligence is likely to be high. In order to create a sense of emotional intelligence in an organization, certain prerequisites such as: the desire for change, self-reflection, attention to the internal feeling of others, development of emotional control,  practice of empathy and development of active listening skills must prevail in the system (Abubakr and Fuad, 2006).

The understanding of conflict and its influence on employee behavior and work outcomes is now an important issue for managers (Abubakr and Fuad, 2006). This can be linked to the fact that the workplace is now rich in terms of conflict seeds as is engineered by organizational politics. Based on this context, Suliman (2003, p. 330) that the sophistication of methods adopted in modern organizations for creation of structures, department and job specifications have increase the growth of counterproductive conflict in the system. As such, a general concurism exist among researchers on the understanding of workplace outcomes as a process where the interaction between employees and organizations influences the behaviors of the members in the system and increases conflict in the system as well. Standing in support to the above statement is that most scholars view conflict in organizations as unavoidable, and since it is unavoidable, it is it important that managers handle issues in that nature with high effectiveness (Rahim et al., 1999, p. 166).

Abraham (1999) hypothesized emotional intelligence as having a positive effect on organizational outcomes of work-groups, perception of workplace appraisal, employee performance, organizational commitment, and citizenship behavior. Still dipping hands in his study, it was found by Abraham (1999) that responders who showed high level of emotional intelligence tend to higher level of job performance. This can be stated to imply that they are more capable of mitigating the negative outcomes of organizational politics. Likewise, Langhorn (2004) argued that emotional intelligence can improve the performance of the management, as managers with high level of emotional intelligence are more capable of understating their subordinates and guiding them toward improved and sustainable performance. In order to further prove the work of Langhorn (2004), Ashkanasy and Hooper (1999) went on to examine the perception and management of emotional intelligence in the workplace. They adopted the believe that affective commitment towards fellow employees will result in positive emotions and is likely to increase success at the workplace.

Moreover, Wong and Law (2002) stated that emotional intelligence of supervisors and subordinates have positive effective on job performance, and they tested the impacts of leader and follower emotional intelligence on overall performance and attitude of organizational members. The result from their findings revealed that emotional intelligence of subordinates influence job performance and satisfaction positives, while that of supervisors influence their satisfaction and added-role behaviors positively. Additionally, they reported that there is a positive relationship between the emotional intelligence and job performance, organizational commitment and low turnover intention of subordinates.

Jordan et al. (2002) attempted a study on the relationship between emotional intelligence, effective team process and focus on organizational goals. The result of his finding is a suggestion that the average emotional intelligence of team members is reflected in the first performance of the team.  The study also revealed that teams with low emotional intelligence always performed lower than those with high emotional intelligence. As a support to the finding, Darling and Walker (2001) argued that effective conflict management is the primary tool for successful organizational leadership. Thus, they are addressing the adoption of behavioral paradigm as the key to successful leadership management.

From the above literatures, a common understanding has been revealed. The understanding is that, emotional intelligence positively influences job performance on an individual and group level. Therefore, it can be stated that emotional intelligence is crucial tool for mitigating the negative impacts of organizational politics, and employee are likely to develop higher emotional intelligence if the organization positions itself towards understanding the emotion of its employees. As such, it should be a core element of organizational training.

2.7 WORKPLACE SPIRITUALITY

Ashmos and Duchon (2000, p. 137) defined organizational spirituality as the understanding of  the fact that people have an inner life which nourishes and is nourished by valuable works undertaken in the view of a community. Giacalone and Jurkiewicz (2003) proposed a different view by defining workplace spirituality as a platform of organization values that are contained with organizational cultures and designed to promote transcendence through work process, enhancing their sense of being as related to their fellow employees in a way that provides a feeling of completeness and joy. In a 1998 symposium, Ian Mitroff addressed the Academy of Management and defined the concept of spirituality as “the desire to discover an ultimate purpose in life, and to live according to this purpose (Cavanagh, 1999, p. 189).

Laabs (1995) and Cavanagh (1999) made it clear that organizational spirituality is not about religion or about getting people to convert to a certain belief. It does not necessary involves a connection with any religious values but instead can be applied as a personal value and philosophy. It is about employees having a spiritual being as souls that must be nourished at work, experience of a sense of purpose and meaning in workplace, and a sense of connection with fellow workers and workplace community (Mitroff and Denton, 1999; Ashmos and Duchon, 2000; Harrington et al., 2001; Milliman et al., 2003). Religion groups people through a sense of dogma and emphasis on formal structure, and advices on the exclusion of people with different beliefs. However, spirituality on the other hand includes everybody irrespective of differences in beliefs, tolerant and open-minded (Mitroff, 2003).

As was pointed out by Laabs (1995), it is much easier to explain what spirituality than to define what it really means. This difficulty experienced in definition has led some authors to view the concept of organizational spirituality with low closed eyes, arguing that it does not deserve the much attention paid towards it (Brown, 2003).Arménio and Miguel (2008) however, argued that it deserves the much attention directed towards it on three accounts.

First, they argued that as Mitroff suggested (interview in Dean, 2004, p. 17), the low degree of accuracy is part of a guiding phenomenon. So, it is better to ignore the definition or organizational politics, but to work from guiding principles and definitions. If an excessively conquerable definition is important as a start, then what is the importance of studying the phenomenon? While definitions are important, they cannot serves as overall substitute to the felling and passion associated with spirituality (Mitroff, 2003, p. 381).

Secondly, Arménio and Miguel (2008) argued that lack of definition should not be a discouragement to research efforts. If researchers decide to contribute to a better understanding of organization concepts and behavioral patterns of employees, they must avoid “intellectual bias” (Mohamed et al., 2004) and not reject studying a topic because of lack of definition or empirical tests in that topic. On the context of organizational spirituality, the lack of definition can be as a result of differences on the way individuals live their spirituality, or it can also be that individuals find it difficult to inform researchers about their spiritual experience at the workplace.

The third reason why research should be pursued on the topic irrespective of definition is that despite the methodological challenges it creates, spirituality is a common need for many humans (Hart and Brady, 2005), and workplace spirituality is a reality that cannot be ignored by organizations and the society ( Judge, 1999; Sanders III et al., 2003). Mitroff and Denton (1999) suggested that the concept of organization as a spiritual entity must be studied, understood and treated in the workplace. This is because, many employees seek to satisfy their spiritual needs by being unique, affirming to something greater than themselves, becoming useful, being understood by others, and understanding how they fit into a greater context (Strack et al., 2002). Employees wish to fell a sense of purpose and value at work, as a well as fell connected with other people and their work environment (Ashmos and Duchon, 2000). Pfeffer (2003) summarized the human goals that most people seek in their workplaces as:

1.      Interesting works that permit learning, development and offers a sense of competence and masters;

2.      Valuable works that define some values;

3.      Works that allow enable a sense of connection and positive social relations with coworkers; and

4.      And works that allows the workers to live an integrated life, and does not crash with his or her desires to live life like a normal human being.

He then went on to added that the time has come for researches to investigate the difference between management practices that are capable of nourishing worker’s spirits and those that are also capable of harming them. The literatures above have been helpful in understanding the reasons why organizational spirituality has become a common debatable area of research, but a consensus is that it positively influences performance (Waddock, 1999).

Majority of the writing on the topic of workplace spirituality have presented a relationship between organizational performance and spirituality. In accordance with Waddock (1999), unification of soul, mind heart and the body into one, both individually and collectively, can help organizations to acknowledge the community as being important for the survival and success of the organization. Other authors have pointed out that leaders who are advanced in their level of spirituality are also more effective in decision making (Cacioppe, 2000; Strack et al., 2002; Fry, 2003; Fry et al., 2005). Other authors have hailed spiritual transformation as being important in the organization because of the fact that work has increasingly become central to employees’ individual growth as a result of decline on the importance of neighborhoods, worship and extended families (Conger, 1994; Burroughs and Eby, 1998; Jurkiewicz and Giacalone, 2004).Brown (2003, p. 396) suggests that workplace spirituality is a candid cure for the ills of modern management, and a way of retaining the lost trust between employees and employers which was created by abnormal practices that followed the massive process of downsizing, abuse of workers and other actions that might have breached psychological contracts (Jurkiewicz and Giacalone, 2004). Others have specifically stated that spirituality contributes to organizational performance (Milliman et al., 1999; Benefiel, 2003a, b; Giacalone and Jurkiewicz, 2003; Sanders III et al., 2003; Garcia-Zamor, 2003; Jurkiewicz and Giacalone, 2004).

Despite the high interest and optimism on the topic, empirical studies linking organizational performance to spirituality or vice versa are still scarce and it has led some authors to call for researches to be done in this areas (Strack et al., 2002; Sanders III et al., 2003; Dean, 2004; Duchon and Plowman, 2005). However, Duchon and Plowman (2005) revealed in their study of a medical unit that work-unit performance is associated with work-unit spirituality, thus further strengthening the relationship between job performance and organizational spirituality. Fry et al. (2005) also revealed a positive relationship between spirituality on leadership, organizational productivity and survival, and employee commitment. Ashar and Lane-Maher (2004) also concluded that mid- and senior-level executives in government agency associates success in workplace to spirituality, stating that one must embrace spirituality in order to be successful.

While difficulties in the definition of workplace spirituality still prevail, with some researchers suggesting that the topic should not be accorded the much attention it presently receives, there is a founding base of understanding among these researches that link organizational spirituality to improved performance from both employees and leaders.

3.0 CONCLUSIONS

From the above discussions, it can be seen that organizational politics is a serious issue in businesses across the globe. This is because, organizational politics have been associated with numerous negative effects such as increased fatigues, increased depression, reduction in employees’ level of commitment, reduction in employee’s productivity and increase in turnover intention.

When not properly managed, these issues are capable of yielding overall reduction in organizational performance and high employee turnover which will make the organization lose its quality workforce. Organizational politics as discussed in this paper is causes because of numerous issues like preferential treatments and greedy management approaches which risk the satisfaction of the overall workforce to achieve the purpose of the person who is behind such practices.

However, in view of understanding the negative impacts of organizational politics, emotional intelligence and spirituality were linked to mitigating these negative effects. Emotional intelligence means understanding the impact of our actions on other people, and spirituality means committing overall efforts to the growth of the organization irrespective of negative influences in the organization. As such, it was recommended that organizational should try to enhance the emotional intelligence of their workforce through programs that teaches them about understanding the impacts of their actions on other people and keeping them fully committed to the overall growth of the business irrespective of the negative influences they encounter while undertaking their daily business activities.

In conclusion, it can be stated that organizational politics is a serious issue and it negatively influences organizational performance as a result of negative influence it has on employees, but these influences can be reduced by emotional intelligence and spirituality.

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