Perceived Organizational Politics, Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Job Attitudes among University Teachers

Universities have always been conceived as vital units contributing in various sectors of development and growth, through intellectual input. Teaching faculty is most important force assumed to contribute in span of knowledge that is substantial for the improvement of society and progress of the state. There are certain organizational and individual issues that need to be addressed to understand in order to facilitate the behavior and attitudes of teaching faculty.Perceived organizational politics (POP) is one of those most important workplace phenomena that directly or indirectly affects the behavior and attitudes of a university teaching and non-teaching employee. Organizational researchers have been interested in exploring its individual as well as interactive effects on employees in various settings. The current study is an endeavor to explore the individual impact of the organizational politics embedded on work outcomes including organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), affective commitment (AC), and job involvement (JI) among university lecturers how they respond while perceiving high organizational politics.Perceived Organizational PoliticsOrganizational politics has been defined as those acts of influence by employees, which are aimed at enhancing or protecting the interests of oneself or of the group (Allen, Madison, Porter, Renwick, & Mayes, 1979). Ferris, Russ, and Fandt (1989) define organizational politics as the influence process which is strategically designed in order to maximize self-interest. These self-interests might be short-term or long-term and these might be consistent or contrary to the interests of others in the organizations. Other definitions indicate organizational politics as power taking action by using various techniques (Buchanan, 2007) and indulging in activities of influencing which are aimed at increasing the interests of oneself or those of the organization (Rosen, Harris, & Kacmar, 2009). When organizational politics is viewed from the side of employees, it often takes a negative form and has been found to be a negative variable at workplace and is termed as perceived organizational politics (POP). It has been argued that organizational politics is not a reality objective enough to be perceived as alike by every individual in the organization; rather, it is differently perceived by everyone. Therefore, it is better to entitle it as "perceived organizational politics" rather than "organizational politics" (Ferris et al., 1989). The most welcomed classification scheme among the researchers and theorists of perceived organizational politics is the three factor classification scheme proposed researchers (Fedor, Ferris, Harrell-Cook, & Russ, 1998; Kacmar & Ferris, 1991). These factors include pay and promotion policies (PPP), go-along-to-get-ahead (GATGA), and general political behavior (GPB). PPP suggests whether the pay raises and promotions of the employees are done on the bases of merit or some other, political way determines the reward structure of the organization. For instance, pay raises, or other benefits may be done on the bases of favoritism or some other political action (Kacmar & Ferris, 1991; Rosen, 2006). GATGA involves those acts of politics where individual remains quiet and takes no action in order to save valued outcomes and that non-threatening silent people are rewarded because they do not take action against others and do not interfere with the acts of powerful others (Kacmar & Ferris, 1991), whereas GPB involves general acts of politics e.g., blaming someone else at work for the mistakes, taking credit of some fellow and going into someone's alloy group who is powerful in the organization (Kacmar & Carlson, 1997; Kacmar & Ferris, 1991; Rosen et al., 2009). These acts are the result of uncertainty where no actual rules are available and are often manifested when the actor wants to approach scarce resources. …