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Organizational politics has been a topic of conceptual and empirical interest for researchers and practitioners for many years. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between organizational politics and employee work outcomes in educational institutions. In addition, this paper also aims to assess the moderating role of social capital.

Employee perceptions about organizational politics and its impact on their work outcomes have been assessed empirically with a sample of 270 full-time employees in higher education institutions of Pakistan. The data have been collected from faculty members of five universities of Pakistan using survey method. SPSS and AMOS have been used to analyze the data and SEM has been used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate a moderating effect of social capital on the relationship between perceived organizational politics and employee outcomes, and the most significant employee outcomes are job stress, job satisfaction and turnover intentions. The findings of the study support the view that organizational politics has negative association with employee job stress and turnover intentions.

Higher education sector in Pakistan is facing certain challenges, which affect talent retention. The findings of this study will help the administration of higher education institutions to develop effective strategies to cope with the challenges of organizational politics, such as motivation, satisfaction and retention of their employees.

The study adds to the literature on organizational politics by highlighting and validating its adverse effects on employee work outcomes in the context of Pakistani higher education.

Ostracism is a subjective and relative concept that renders itself to multiple manifestations and context-specific outcomes. Therefore, this study identified specific behaviours that are perceived as workplace ostracism by teaching faculty of Pakistani Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs). Building on belongingness theory, the ramifications of ostracism on psychological well-being are outlined along with the context-specific factors that shape these outcomes.

A phenomenological approach was adopted, and 30 semi-structured interviews from the teaching faculty of HEIs in Lahore, Pakistan, were conducted. The transcribed interviews were coded, and an inductive thematic analysis via NVivo 12 Plus software was used to generate themes and sub-themes.

Five behaviours, i.e. biased treatment, exclusion from formal and informal interactions, interpersonal alienation, delayed sharing or hiding of knowledge, lack of work-related, social and emotional support constituted the acts of ostracism in studied HEIs. The psychological well-being of faculty suffered in terms of negative emotions, reduced job, career and life satisfaction in their work and family life. The contextual factors deciding the intensity of outcomes resulting from workplace encompassed head of department (HOD) support, pay, friendly relations, fear of confrontation, alternative job options and designation of faculty members.

This research is a pioneer in using an in-depth phenomenological approach to define a behavioural typology of ostracism in academia. Moreover, a much needed holistic outcome of psychological well-being is explored in work and non-work domains and further elucidated in light of context-specific factors.