Since the Reform and Opening-up in China, the rapid development of China’s economy has lasted for nearly forty years. As the basic units of economic activity, Chinese enterprises also continue to grow. Especially in recent years, the enterprises have become increasingly scientific and standardized. However, the “Officer Standard”, residual product of thousands of years of Chinese feudal society and the centralization consciousness in culture, leads to organizational polities existing in various organizations. Moreover, the inevitable contradiction between the scarcity of resources and the multiplicity of interests aggravates intrigue and calculation. As a subjective understanding and evaluation of the degree of Self-Interest behaviors of other people in the organization, perception of organizational politics has been proved to have an important impact on the attitude and behavior of employees. As a heated research topic of active organization behavior, work engagement may be affected by the perception of organizational politics of the staff, and has a profound influence on the organization's vitality and development. Based on the Chinese cultural background, this research theoretically studies the relationship among the perception of organizational politics, perceived organization support, organizational commitment and work engagement. We adopt the method of literature research and go over the related research results systematically. At the same time, we put forward the theoretical model of this study by employing Conservation of Resources theory and Social Exchange theory. Our research result has indicated that the perception of organizational politics is negatively related to work engagement, in which organizational commitment plays a mediating role and perceived organization support plays a regulating role.
In management practice, because of the scarcity of the organization resources and the multiplicity of interests, the organization politics is filled in the every process of enterprise management. Burns proposed “micro politics” in 1961, which was regarded as opening a new chapter in the study of organizational politics by academic circles. He stated that organizational politics was a behavior that individual utilized organizational resources in order to obtain better working environment, stronger power and influence. These behaviors might generate adverse effects on organizational internal competition fairness [
Perception belongs to the category of psychology. It is a process of selecting, organizing and explaining the information that people feel. Lewin (1936) indicated that people reacted to the perception of reality rather than the reality itself [
So far, research studying the perception of organizational politics has become matured gradually in Western countries. Most of researches on perception of organizational politics are based on western cultural background. A discussion is worthwhile whether present research results are still available in other cultural background. Moreover, present researches paid more attention on how perception of organizational politics directly influences on employees’ work engagements and less attention to the internal mechanism between the two variables. We searched literatures by means of keyword searching method in CNKI and found that there were only 145 relevant researches about perception of organizational politics in China. Obviously, it is not enough to provide millions organizations in China with guidance significance. The progress of the research about perception of organizational politics in China lagged far behind Chinese economic development.
Hofstede (1980) pointed that national culture did influence employees’ mental programs [
In the research, we were going to analyze the relationship among perception of organizational politics, organizational commitment and work engagements so as to explore how perception of organizational politics influences employees’ work engagements. At the same time, we took employees’ perceived organization support into our consideration and studied how perceived organization support played its role in our research framework. Hence, we theoretically discussed the relationship among four variables, including perception of organizational politics, perceived organization support, organizational commitment and work engagements.
Scientific research must be based on a solid theoretical research. Therefore, sufficient analysis of the literature data is significant. We searched a large amount of literatures both in China and abroad from CNKI and Springer by keywords searching, including perception of organizational politics, perceived organization support, organizational commitment and work engagements to achieve purpose of our research. We started with summarizing and analyzing previous research results and come up with our research topic. With the support of theory, we put forward a hypothesis model with four variables, including perception of organizational politics, perceived organization support, organizational commitment and work engagements, which contained mediating effect and moderating effect.
In our research, we preferred adopting definition of perception of organizational politics from Ferris, G. et al. (2000). They defined perception of organizational politics as a subjective evaluation of degree of self-serving behavior of organization members in the working environment. Usually, perception of organizational politics is divided into three dimensions, including general political behavior, going along to get ahead, pay and promotion policies [
Schaufeli, B. et al. (2002) defined work engagements as a positive and enjoyable psychological state related to work, which was also a persistent and pervasive emotional cognitive state. Its main features included vigor, dedication and absorption [
Hypothesis 1: Perception of organizational politics is negatively related to employees’ work engagements.
Becker (1960) took the lead to put out organizational commitment theory that organization commitment was based on the economic benefit on both sides. He thought with working in a same organization longer and longer and considering the contribution he made to organization, people usually were not willing to leave their organization. They were scared of losing what they get from the organization now, which made them had to stay on [
We also did the analysis from the three dimensions of perception of organizational politics. Firstly, if employees perceive general political behavior, it reflects that they realized some threatening behaviors are implemented in their organization, suppressing and bullying, for instance. So their emotional relationship with organization will be damaged. Secondly, if employees perceive going along to get ahead, they are aware that the organization is hierarchical and seniority-based. In that case, they believe in the unwritten rules that a person of high position is liable to be attacked. As a result, they have to choose to remain low-key to avoid making mistakes. And the psychological burden jeopardizes their dependence on the organization and responsibility to organization. In other words, perception of organizational politics would result in the reduction of organizational commitment. Thirdly, they are aware of unfairness among the compensation system and promotion system, which, in their opinion, fail to reflect their contribution to organization truly. Undoubtedly, they feel dissatisfied and lose faith in organization and finally they became less committed to the organizations to which they belonged. Previous research, including some conducted in China, also have similar conclusions [
Hypothesis 2: Perception of organizational politics is negatively related to employees’ organizational commitment.
Hobfoll (1989) put forward Conservation of Resources theory to describe the process of resource interaction between individual and social environment. The core of the theory was that individuals with more resources were not vulnerable to the loss of resources, and they had more ability to obtain resources and vice versa [
Hypothesis 3: Organizational Commitment is positively related to employees’ work engagements.
In the practice of research, organizational commitment is also widely used as mediating role to explore the workplace behavior. It was proved that affective commitment and perceived sacrifice commitment played a fully mediated role between pay satisfaction and turnover intention [
Hypothesis 4: Organizational Commitment played a mediating role in the correlation between perceptions of organizational politics and employees’ work engagements.
The theory of perceived organization support was established based on Social Exchange theory, Performance-Reward Expectancy, Personification of Organization [
Whether the employees believed the compensation, benefits and promotion were fair would influence their perceived organization support [
As our previous inference, we thought while employees got perceptions of organizational politics, their organizational commitment would suffer from destroy. But this negative correlation was likely to be weakened to those with high perceived organization support. Because perceived organization support encouraged employees to develop cooperation, which could establish trust relationships among organization. Moreover, perceived organization support made them feel to be valued [
Perceived organization support was also regarded as a moderating variable in the past research. Gao, Z. et al. (2012) proved that perceived organization support played a moderating role in the correlation between psychological capital and role stress [
Hypothesis 5: Perceived organization support played a moderating role in the correlation between perceptions of organizational politics and employees’ organizational commitment in such a way that the correlation would be weakened for those with higher perceived organization support.
On the basis of the analysis above, we established the researching framework among perception of organizational politics, perceived organization support, organizational commitment and work engagement. We put forward five hypothesizes and summarized as follow: 1) Perception of organizational politics is negatively related to employees’ work engagements; 2) Perception of organizational politics is negatively related to employees’ organizational commitment; 3) Organizational commitment is positively related to employees’ work engagements; 4) Organizational commitment played a mediating role in the correlation between perceptions of organizational politics and employees’ work engagements; 5) Perceived organization support played a moderating role in the correlation between perceptions of organizational politics and employees’ organizational commitment in such a way that the correlation would be weakened for those with higher perceived organization support. The frame diagram of our research was showed in
Organizational politics is common phenomena, which has been proved to bring about negative job attitudes and workplace behaviors. On the one hand, so far most of the researches are based on the western cultural background. Whether the results will be available in other cultural background needs further investigations. On the other hand, researches on organizational politics are still at the beginning stage in China, while that in Western countries has achieved considerable results. In this context, we carry out our research by literature analysis and the result indicates that the perception of organizational politics is negatively related to employees’ work engagements, in which organizational commitment plays a mediating role and perceived organization support plays a regulating role. Moreover, perceived organization support regulates the negative correlation between the perception of organizational politics and organizational commitment in such a way that the negative correlation will be weakened for those with higher perceived organization support. Furthermore, if the hypothesizes we put forward are correct, Chinese enterprises should manage to reduce the frequency and strength of organizational politics. As analyzed above, we think that the perception of organizational politics will harm employees’ work engagements by decreasing their organizational commitment. For one thing, the enterprises should take effective measures to decrease organizational politics. Meanwhile, the management should evaluate results of organizational politics by implementing new policies, like designing compensation system and promotion system. For another, while organizational politics is inevitable, the enterprises should provide more support to employees and care more about their benefits to minimize the negative correlation between the perception of organizational politics and work engagements. In the end, the limitation of our research is that we adopt theoretical research method without empirical research method, and we will implement that in the subsequent research.
ZhiliangRong,GuilingCao, (2015) A Framework for Research and Practice: Relationship among Perception of Organizational Politics, Perceived Organization Support, Organizational Commitment and Work Engagements. Open Journal of Business and Management,03,433-440. doi: 10.4236/ojbm.2015.34043