Organizational Politics

What is organizational politics?

Meaning of Organizational Politics: – Organizational politics are informal, unofficial, and sometimes behind efforts to sell ideas, influence an organization, increase power, or achieve other targeted objectives. Political behavior in organizations involves many activities such as spreading rumors, leaking confidant information, favoring others in the organization for mutual benefit. Organizational Politics is self-serving behavior not approved by the organization.

It is also known as office politics and organizational politics. It involves the use of power and social networking within a workplace to achieve changes that benefit the organization or individuals within it.

• The positive side of organizational politics is characterized by their analysis of the situation in terms of personal and organizational goals, open problem solving, and victory.
• The downside of organizational politics is characterized by observing the situation in a win-win situation, keeping hidden agendas, advancing self-interest.
• When people play politics, it causes controversy, conflict, tension, anxiety and uncertainty in the organization.

What are the features of organisational politics?

Organizational politics has the following feature: –

• It’s purpose is personal gain arising from the use of power and not organizational gain.
• It is a deliberate attempt to use politics as a source to broaden its power base.
• It is not part of a person’s job requirement. It is used to benefit a person.
• It may be legitimate or illegal mate political behavior.

What are the consequences of organizational politics?

Although political behavior has positive consequences for those involved in moral politics, those who do not have political skills do not face positive results.

The negative consequences of organizational politics are as follows: –

1. Low job satisfaction: – Although personal benefits are achieved, people who do not receive promotions or awards based on their completeness on the job may have lower job satisfaction. Those who want to achieve goals on the basis of merit, but politics are not satisfied with their jobs if they have to adopt political behavior as an inevitable course of action.
2. High tension: – If a person does not engage in political behavior on the basis of morality and ethics, he loses his chances of promotion, as others are overtaken by political behaviour, it increases his job stress.
3. Organizational Conflict: – Organizational conflict is a disagreement between two or more organization members or groups arising from the fact that they must share scarce resources or work activities and / or the fact that they have different conditions, goals, values and perceptions. It negatively affects productivity.
4. Goal Displacement: – Organizational politics broadens the power base of some people who use it to promote personal goals rather than organizational goals. This leads to target displacement.
5. Low Performance: – The political environment reduces people’s motivation to work which negatively affects their job performance.
6. High Absenteeism and Turnover: – When low work performance, low job satisfaction, employees struggle to handle and job stress become too much, absenteeism of workers from the workplace will increase. Employee turnover refers to the number or percentage of workers who leave an organization and are replaced by new employees..

What are the factors affecting organizational politics?

Some of the major factors that contribute to organizational politics are as follows: –

1. Competition for Power: – Political behavior emerges because people want to gain power, that is, over and above authority they have been assigned formalities. They want to gain power because it is satisfactory to them. Since the amount of electricity, like other resources, is limited, often, there is competition to obtain power.
2. Discretionary Authority: – Organizations confer status with discretionary authority to exercise such powers in the case of special needs such as emergencies in organizations. Such authority is exercised on the basis of personal judgment.
3. Subjective Evaluation of Performance: – Adjective evaluation of performance can also lead to political behavior in many cases, performance evaluation cannot be based on any concrete achievement, and it is the decision of the superior that is taken as the basis of performance evaluation is. This can happen where performance cannot be measured quantitatively.
4. Saturation in Promotion: – People feel that they have reached the saturation level of promotion. When they reach the maximum level according to their talent and skills, they resort to political behavior. Some of the principles it describes are that in a hierarchy, each employee rises to a level of incompetence and will have no other occupation than to engage in politics that has undesirable consequences.
5. Joint Decision Making: – Large organizations emphasize joint decision by various units to solve common problems. Conflict and politics arise from joint decision making. To make favorable decisions, it is to involve people in politics by forming alliances and associations, which they will be able to achieve their objectives.

Managing Organisational Politics

The following guidelines are helpful in reducing the ill effects of organizational politics: –

1. Most of the reason for political behavior is due to lack of clarity in job definition, role, rules, process, clearly determining these things, some useless behavior and authority. Therefore, by prescribing these things clearly, these aspects helps to reduce favoritism, nepotism, nepotism, and gives people the opportunity to spend in the organization of themselves and others.
2. When top people misuse the system, exploit opportunities for their benefits, or reward non-performance criteria, other organizational members will soon follow it, therefore, not allowing top management to engage in the politics of dilemma but it should be clearly mentioned that such a behaviour should be penalized.
3. Management can take direct action to curb political behavior. When politics prevents the organization from discovering its objectives, management action resumes. When the first signal becomes clear it can stop the offensive strategy. Similarly, when people do the politics of being indifferent to the decisions they take, they should be held personally responsible for the decisions.
4. As far as possible, there should be objective criteria for setting objectives for individuals and departments, and the rewarding of individuals should be entirely on the attainment of these objectives. When the objectives are clearly specified, any deviation from this will be apparent and it will be easier to control.