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Persistent change has placed considerable pressure on organizations to keep up or fade into obscurity. Firms that remain viable, or even thrive, are staffed with decision-makers who capably steer organizations toward opportunities and away from threats. Accordingly, leadership development has never been more critical. In this chapter, the authors propose that leader development is an inherently dyadic process initiated to communicate formal and informal expectations. The authors focus on the informal component, in the form of organizational politics, as an element of leadership that is critical to employee and company success. The authors advocate that superiors represent the most salient information source for leader development, especially as it relates to political dynamics embedded in work systems. The authors discuss research associated with our conceptualization of dyadic political leader development (DPLD). Specifically, the authors develop DPLD by exploring its conceptual underpinnings as they relate to sensemaking, identity, and social learning theories. Once established, the authors provide a refined discussion of the construct, illustrating its scholarly mechanisms that better explain leader development processes and outcomes. The authors then expand research in the areas of political skill, political will, political knowledge, and political phronesis by embedding our conceptualization of DPLD into a political leadership model. The authors conclude by discussing methodological issues and avenues of future research stemming from the development of DPLD.

Work environments, which are widely acknowledged to exert strong influences on employee attitudes and behavior, have been studied since the initiation of formal work entities. Over this time, scholars have identified myriad impactful internal and external factors. Absent though are investigations examining economic downturns despite their acknowledged pervasiveness and destructive effects on worker performance and well-being. To address this theoretical gap, a multistage model acknowledging the impact of recessions on workplace responses, response effects, and environmental considerations is proposed. Inherent in this discussion is the role of economic decline on reactive change processes, the nature of work, and the structure and design of organizations. These significant changes affect employee attitudes and behaviors in ways that increase the political nature of these work environments. Organizational factors and employee responses to heightened recession-driven politics are discussed. Additionally, theoretically relevant intervening variables capable of influencing work outcomes are described. The chapter is concluded by discussing the implications of this theoretical framework as well as directions for future research.

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.

This article is based on a study of the experiences of women chief executives in British local government. Our emphasis will be on our experiences of carrying out the study, and, in particular, on encountering and working with the political aspects of our research. Following a brief outline of our main findings, we review some of the dangers of “doing research” on women. We continue by describing our first encounters with the politics of gender research – the voices of discouragement that questioned the need for the research. We then outline our attempts to understand more about how our relations with each other as a pair of researchers enabled us to surface the political properties of our research. The article discusses the role of reflexivity in maintaining awareness of researcher bias, and how this might affect our analysis of the experiences of women in the system being studied. Next, we discuss how action researchers inevitably become part of a political system that is characterised by different actors holding different aspirations for research outcomes, and argue that collaborative forms of research are necessary if one is to listen to the range of voices that stakeholders represent. We tackle the question about how researchers may “let go” of research of this kind given their political attachments to the topic. Finally, we conclude that spelling out the dilemmas inherent in research of this kind is more likely to achieve results that are well grounded in the political and organisational realities of participants’ experiences.

Research has shown accountability can produce both positive and negative outcomes. Further, because of inherent environmental uncertainty, perceptions of organizational politics often interact with accountability to produce negative effects. However, using uncertainty management theory, the purpose of this paper is to argue that employees can use proactive voice to exercise control in the ambiguity of highly accountable and political environments.

This two sample study of graduate school alumni (n=211) and insurance employees (n=186) explored the three-way interaction of felt accountability×politics perceptions×proactive voice on work performance, job satisfaction, and job tension.

As hypothesized, high levels of felt accountability and politics were most strongly associated with favorable outcomes when coupled with increased voice behavior. Conversely, felt accountability and politics were related to negative outcomes in settings associated with low proactive voice. Results supported in Sample 1 were then constructively replicated in Sample 2.

All employees are held accountable to some degree, and all work in potentially political settings. Often, these environmental features are dictated to employees, leaving only employee reactions in direct control. One possible response is voice. As demonstrated in the present research, employees who engage in proactive voice appear to exercise some degree of control over their environment, resulting in more positive outcomes than their less active counterparts.

The present research extends understanding regarding the effects of accountability in organizations by demonstrating that contextual factors (e.g. politics) and individual difference variables (e.g. in levels of proactive voice) differentiate favorable vs unfavorable outcomes of accountability.

This study addresses a central research question: Is individuals’ propensity to hide knowledge a “political phenomenon” among researchers in the Indian higher education institutions? Drawing upon social exchange and uncertainty management theories, the authors examine how a three-way interaction effect of perceptions of organizational politics, political will and political skill contributes to knowledge hiding. In addition, this study aims to develop a nuanced understanding of the knowledge hiding phenomenon in the Indian higher education context.

This study adopts a mixed-method study design with an explanatory sequential approach. The authors gathered data through a cross-sectional survey of 286 researchers (Study 1) followed by two focus group discussions (Study 2) involving 13 academic researchers from five Indian universities. The sample includes full-time faculty members, postgraduate and full-time doctoral students engaged in research.

The results of Study 1 indicate that researchers’ perceptions of organizational politics positively relate to their knowledge hiding. The findings of this study also suggest that the positive relationship between perceptions of organizational politics and knowledge hiding turns negative for individuals with high political will and high political skill. The focus group discussions (Study 2) explore significant predictors of knowledge hiding. This study unveils various characteristics of knowledge, knowledge hider, knowledge seeker and interpersonal dynamics as the key drivers of knowledge hiding in Indian academia.

The significant contributions of this study are to provide new insights into the relationship between organizational politics and knowledge hiding and to unravel the various factors that incite knowledge hiding among researchers in the Indian higher education context. This study is one among the few in the knowledge hiding literature to adopt a mixed-method research design with an explanatory sequential approach.

This paper aims to look into employee perceptions of politics and fairness in a work setting where a new merit pay system had recently been implemented.

The results are based on employee survey responses from three governmental organizations (n=367) that had implemented analogous merit pay systems.

Hierarchical moderated regression results indicated that perceptions of politics and fairness distinctively and interactively predicted whether the pay system was perceived effective in achieving its objectives. The results suggest that some forms of politics in performance appraisals (e.g. compression) might be perceived less detrimental than others (e.g. favoritism). In a high politics environment, the pay system effectiveness varied as a function of the level of distributive justice. Voice in the pay system development only mattered in a situation where there was a low level of organizational politics.

One of the main limitations of this study is its reliance on cross‐sectional data. Future research should complement employee perceptions about pay system effectiveness with objective data from the organizations studied. Research on the effect of contextual factors, such as national culture on the motives, in and reactions to, organizational politics, is desired.

The result suggests that the adopted merit pay systems were not ineffective or detrimental per se, but that the effectiveness varied as a function of the established political and fairness climates at different levels of the organization.

This study contributes to the discussion on what are the conditions under which politics and fairness are antithetical, and when they are interactively associated with outcomes.

Much of the research associated with organizational politics has focused on negative outcomes such as stress, burnout, and turnover intention. Only a limited amount of research has focused on identifying the psychological mechanisms that explain the influence of negative organizational politics on individual and organizational outcomes. In this chapter, we propose a more positive conceptualization of organizational politics and explore potential associations between both positive and negative politics and employee engagement. More specifically, we propose a model showing how the psychological conditions of psychological safety, availability, and meaningfulness explain the relationship between perceptions of positive and negative politics and employee engagement. We conclude by suggesting practical interventions to assist organizations develop a more positive organizational political climate.

This paper delineates the distinctive nature of appraisal politics perceptions (referenced to organizational politics) experienced by appraisees (APAP) as a form of hindrance work stressor that is more episodic than chronic, salient during the PA rating and reward decisions. The study argues and attempts to establish empirically that due to its distinct nature, it causes both short-term episodic strain and long-term chronic strain. Further, the study investigates the distinctive role played by appraisee's hard and soft influence behaviour as a coping mechanism moderating the influence of APAP as a stressor on strain variables in Indian organizational context that ferments politics.

The data was collected using self-reports from 407 employees in Indian organizations using survey method. Multivariate analyses including moderating tests were used for testing the hypotheses.

Only the episodic components of the APAP-appraiser's rating politics and pay and promotion politics were significantly related to anxiety felt by appraisees during PA – an episodic measure of strain. All three APAP components were significantly related to the chronic strain measure of dissatisfaction. There was modest support for the role of influence tactics (IT) as a coping mechanism attenuating the negative relation of APAP with the dissatisfaction variables as chronic strain measures. Contrary to the hypothesis, softer tactics exacerbated the APAP–PA anxiety relation, indicating the episodic nature of stressor and strain.

The study contributes significantly to enhance the understanding about the nature of Appraisal politics.

This study considered organizational politics as a source of stress and examined its spillover effects on the family domain. By integrating the work–home resource theory and transactional theory of stress, the authors developed a moderated mediation model that examined the moderating role of family support in the relationship between employee's perceptions of organizational politics and their family satisfaction through work-to-family conflict.

The authors examined the moderated mediation model using a sample of 223 full-time employees in Bangladesh. Data were collected using a three-wave survey research design.

The results indicate that organizational politics is negatively related to family satisfaction; work-to-family conflict medicates this relationship. Besides, family support attenuates the mediating effect of work-to-family conflict on the relationship between organizational politics and family satisfaction.

Managers should reduce the extent of organizational politics to avoid its impact on the nonwork domain. Moreover, social support from family members might play a crucial role in reducing the negative consequence of organizational politics in the family domain. By taking human resource practices such as training, increased communication, family-friendly policies, organizations may improve the ability of workers to cope with the negative consequences of organizational politics.

The current study uncovered the spillover effect of organizational politics on the nonwork domain. This research contributed to the burgeoning stream of organizational politics and work–family interface literature by investigating the influence of organizational politics in undermining family satisfaction and exploring the mediating mechanism linking organizational politics and family satisfaction as well as the boundary conditions of family social support.