Search results

This study addresses a central research question: Does employees' personal initiative, with a benevolent political will, lead to career growth prospects in a work environment replete with perceived organizational politics? Drawing upon self-determination, signalling, and social cognitive theories, the authors examine how perceptions of organizational politics operate to limit the influence of benevolent political will – induced personal initiative on career growth prospects.

This research adopts a quantitative research design. This multi-wave, multi-sample and multi-source investigation includes 730 subordinate-supervisor dyads from India's information technology, education and manufacturing companies. The sample comprises 236 full-time faculty members from higher educational institutions and 496 mid-level managers from technical and service departments of information technology and manufacturing companies.

The results indicate that benevolent political will is significantly related to career growth prospects. In addition, perceptions of organizational politics shows a crossover interaction effect. The findings reveal that the indirect relationship between benevolent political will and career growth prospects changed significantly from those with a low perception of organizational politics to significantly negative among those perceiving organizational politics as high.

This study provides several implications for practice regarding personal initiative, benevolent political will and perceptions of organizational politics.

The significant contributions of this study are to provide new insights into the relationship between benevolent political will and career growth prospects and to unravel the paradoxical nature of the personal initiative phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating role of political skill in the relationship between proactive personality and citizenship performance, as mediated by career satisfaction.

The authors collected data from a diverse sample of 356 employees, and tested a moderated mediation model, in which proactive personality and political skill jointly impact career satisfaction, which in turn impacts citizenship performance.

The results indicate that career satisfaction mediates the relationship between proactive personality and two forms of citizenship performance, citizenship toward supervisor, and job/task conscientiousness. Political skill moderates these mediated relationships such that proactive individuals who are also politically skilled are more likely to demonstrate greater citizenship toward supervisor and job/task conscientiousness via increased career satisfaction.

The study suggests that proactive employees, due to their enhanced career satisfaction, tend to demonstrate greater organizational citizenship. Such positive tendencies are enhanced when proactive employees are equipped with political skill. Limitations include the use of cross-sectional design and single source data.

Organizations and human resources managers should be aware of the importance of personal career satisfaction and interpersonal competency in building organizational citizenship. Organizations may facilitate citizenship performance by recruiting individuals high in proactive personality and political skill.

Prior research has typically considered career satisfaction as an outcome variable. The authors examine career satisfaction as an intermediate variable leading to citizenship performance. The authors also examine the contingent effect of proactive personality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature and role of the politico‐administrative institutions on career development in the Greek state employment. It attempts to achieve this by exploring the extent to which such institutions are still fitted within the Napoleonic and Weberian traditions and how these may affect the policy implementation of career progression within one public organisation in Greece.

The study takes an interpretivist inductive perspective and its nature is qualitative with an exploratory and explanatory aim. It adopts a case‐study strategy and data were collected through documentary evidence, structured questionnaires and semi‐structured interviews with key informants.

The emerging career model in the Greek public sector is still embedded within a highly bureaucratic yet clientelistic system. It frequently overlaps with employment due to external institutional influences and though being bureaucratic thus objective at national level it is political manifested thus subjective at organisational level. Objective careers have by no means disappeared while subjective careers are seen as a political vehicle for inter‐organisational advancement.

Despite the in‐depth and rich qualitative analysis of this study further case‐examples are required in similar national and industrial contexts.

The study provides a useful real‐life practical example on the interlocking of career progression and political clientelism in a national context in which politico‐administrative mechanisms have traditionally oiled the wheels of the civil society.

The paper adds to the limited body of scientific and academic debate engaging with public sector management issues and the emerging state career models in European Mediterranean countries. It also contributes to the impartial knowledge on the traditional career mechanisms, underpinned by a relational psychological contract, that have long been an implicit feature of state employment in bureaucratic public sector organisations.

Are public officials held accountable for political scandals? Existing scholarship typically focuses on voters' response to scandals showing politicians are often punished at the polls for scandals. Specifically, they are more likely to be punished for the abuse of public office for personal gain than for scandals involving personal affairs. That said, not all politicians implicated in scandals seek reelection. Although difficult to observe, many politicians may be pushed out of office by their political party before they have an opportunity to stand for reelection – resigning or retiring before the next election. Others are appointed and consequently never stand for election. We collect a new dataset to understand how scandals affect politicians' careers and whether public officials are held accountable at other junctures. We trace the pathways of politicians implicated in scandals. We document the type and onset of scandals, individuals' reactions to scandals, and whether and when they leave office. Our novel data contribution provides rich descriptive statistics on corruption in the US Congress over time, with new insights into the conditions under which scandals end politicians' careers. The common patterns and significant differences revealed in these data suggest that the impact of scandals on public officials' careers may have less to do with the nature of the scandal or the specific actions undertaken by those implicated and may depend more on the actions of political parties.

Today, appearance is an integral aspect of a politician's image and personality and therefore his or her brand (Budesheim & DePaola, 1994; Sanghvi & Hodges, 2015; Smith & French, 2009). While appearance is critical to political marketing, most of the research focusing on appearance in politics is experimental in nature (Lenz & Lawson, 2011; Olivola & Todorov, 2010; Todorov et al., 2005). This study investigates the importance of appearance for marketing politicians through a qualitative interpretivist framework that offers implications for theory. Moreover, this chapter offers a specific focus on the importance of appearance for female politicians.

Research shows women face greater scrutiny on their appearance (Carlin & Winfrey, 2009; Sanghvi, 2018). This chapter examines myriad of issues women in politics face based on their appearance. It also examines how women have successfully managed the issue of appearance at local, state and national levels. Thus, this study delivers a multifaceted view of the topic and facilitates the understanding of how appearance management enters into the political marketing process.

Many relationships between politicians and bureaucrats are based on an energy‐equilibrium model where the politicians provide energy and the bureaucrats, equilibrium. According to this model, conflicts occur when one partner does not adequately fulfill his or her expected role. This model may be fruitfully used to study the relationship between the politician, the career bureaucrat, and the political appointee. The division of roles among this “ménage à trois” is particularly difficult and often generates tension. The situation is most prone to conflict when the government is in a period of change. At such times, the newly elected politicians have a tendency to mistrust the established bureaucracy and to depend almost exclusively on their political appointees. The dysfunctions induced by this phenomenon, in regard to the capacity of the bureaucracy to adequately fulfill its equilibrium role, are very clearly illustrated by the Canadian political transition of 1984, when the federal government was handed over to the Progressive Conservative Party. A series of interviews with ministers, senior civil servants, and senior policy advisors, all of whom had ringside seats to this transition, shows how the extensive power granted to ministerial offices aggravated the difficulties usually associated with a period of transition. This particular transition illustrates how important it is for the newly elected to ensure that their partisan policy advisors play their roles without getting in the way of the indispensable cooperation which must be established between ministers and senior civil servants.

Administrative reforms in Argentina have followed an irregular trajectory as a result of the penetration of patronage in the state apparatus. Extensive politicization has impeded the development of a univocal and stable civil service at the national level.

In this context, the goal of this chapter is to analyze the characteristics of the federal civil service in its interaction with actors and institutions of the political system during the 2004–2014 period. The study reveals two main findings: (1) a diversity of bureaucratic formats coexist in the country, both formally and informally; and (2) the relationships between the administration and the political system vary according to the predominant bureaucratic format.

The study of cause lawyers has focused heavily on the private sector, but both public and private attorneys bring voting rights litigation. This chapter first situates voting rights litigation within cause lawyering, as described by Scheingold and Sarat. It then suggests criteria for analyzing cause lawyering across public and private sectors and applies them to the attorneys who have done the majority of voting rights litigation for American Indians: The Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division and the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. The chapter suggests that the public and private attorneys are more similar than one might expect in their motivation, relationship to clients, and range of political strategies used. Their organizational practice sites differ greatly, but the dynamics of the public practice site confirm that Voting Section attorneys are cause lawyers.

Modernization attempts have been undertaken in Uruguay during the last 20 years, inspired by both neo-managerial and neo-Weberian approaches. However, except for a few cases, most reforms have failed to achieve substantial gains in administrative capacity, effectiveness, or efficiency. We argue that some virtuous qualities of Uruguayan democracy can also show a dark side as they frequently turn into obstacles for State sector reform, no matter its orientation. Firstly, the electoral and party system obliges the Executive to build wide interparty consensus through intensive negotiations in order to advance significant transformations. Secondly, there are multiple nonpartisan actors which are powerful enough to block reform attempts. Moreover, the current pact between politicians and bureaucrats carries several negative consequences: high politicization of management decisions, serious management deficit, as well as low responsiveness of middle and lower staff levels. For all these reasons, the road to modernization of public management in Uruguay is sinuous and plagued with obstacles.

This paper investigates the impacts of globalization processes on the Swiss business elite community during the 1980–2010 period. Switzerland has been characterized in the 20th century by its extraordinary stability and by the strong cohesion of its elite community. To study recent changes, we focus on Switzerland’s 110 largest firms’ by adopting a diachronic perspective based on three elite cohorts (1980, 2000, and 2010). An analysis of interlocking directorates allows us to describe the decline of the Swiss corporate network. The second analysis focuses on top managers’ profiles in terms of education, nationality as well as participation in national community networks that used to reinforce the cultural cohesion of the Swiss elite community, especially the militia army. Our results highlight a slow but profound transformation of top management profiles, characterized by a decline of traditional national elements of legitimacy and the emergence of new “global” elements. The diachronic and combined analysis brings into light the strong cultural changes experienced by the national business elite community.