Determinants of Performance in Government: Focusing on the Effect of Organizational Politics and Conflicts in Organizations

ABSTRACT

Conflicts and politics in organizations are common in both the public and private sectors. However, there are few comprehensive studies regarding the relationship between politics, conflicts, and outcomes in the public sector. Therefore, this study sought to empirically explore the relationships between organizational performance, organizational conflicts, and organizational politics in the public sector. To analyze the effects of organizational politics and conflicts on performance in government organizations, hierarchical multiple regression analyses were performed. The results indicated that organizational politics and relationship conflicts negatively affect organizational performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Organizational performance
• organizational politics
• relationship conflict
• task conflict

Notes

¹ Although many researchers in business administration have made efforts to study organizational conflicts, conflict management, organizational politics, and organizational performance, their studies are limited in several ways because most of their research only focused on the narrow perspective of the relationships between conflicts and performance or between politics and performance. That is, few studied extensively with a focus on the relationships between conflicts, politics, and performance simultaneously.

² Employees’ knowledge of how their work relates to the agency’s goals and priorities.

³ The Perception of Organizational Politics Scale (POPS) designed by Kacmar and Ferris (1991) has been used widely for measuring organizational politics. This research employs the POPS to test the research questions.

⁴ Vigoda (2000a) also used the POPS of Kacmar and Ferris (1991).

⁵ Pfeffer (1981) explains that these five conditions are fundamental factors activating organizational conflicts and politics.

⁶ However, political scientists would emphasize conflict when studying power, the decision-making process, bureaucracy, and other topics linked to public administration.

⁷ Regarding the research model, it is necessary to mention the possibility of endogeneity issues. For instance, the poor perceived performance might cause more politics in the organization as various factions attempt to come up with reasons for the failure. Nevertheless, this study builds its research model based on the previous empirical studies and focuses on causal relationships between the variables in terms of the time precedence of independent variables, in accordance with the research models in previous studies.