Antecedents of Employee Career Development: An Examination of Politics and Guanxi

Abstract

As a novel concept pertaining to organizational studies, organizational politics has attracted the attention of an increasing number of researchers in multiple disciplines. Although efforts have been made for validating the perceived organizational politics scale (POPS) and exploring its antecedents, the detailed influencing process of organizational politics and its cultural implications have not been exposed to in-depth examination. To fill the gap, this study aims to address following two research questions: (1) can Chinese employees gain career development opportunities if they have a high level of political skill, and how? (2) within the context of Chinese organizations, what are the mediating and moderating mechanisms linking employees' political skills and their career development opportunities? This study explored the role of guanxi with the direct supervisor and the impact of perceived organizational politics, echoing the call for contextualizing studies in Chinese society (Tsui, 2006) and for cross-level theorization and empirical testing (Klein Kozlowski, 2000). In total, 426 employees in 16 Chinese manufacturing enterprises were sampled. To avoid the common method variance problem, for each of the employees, two colleagues and one direct supervisor were also invited to the survey. The final matched sample included 343 employees, 662 colleagues, and 343 direct supervisors. Among the major measures, the 18-item political skills scale was adopted from Ferris et al.'s (2005) study; employee-supervisor guanxi was measured via 6 items that were used by Law et al. (2000); and the perception of organizational politics was measured by using the indigenous scale developed by Ma et al.'s (2006). We refined this scale to suit our purpose. Cronbach's alpha values for these measures ranged from 0.70 to 0.95, indicating acceptable measurement reliabilities. In order to measure organizational political climate, POPS obtained from individuals was aggregated to the firm level with satisfactory statistics (Rwg 0.70, ICC (1) 0.05, and ICC (2) 0.50). Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) was employed to analyze the merged cross-level data. Results show that political skills have significant positive influence on an employee's career development, even after controlling his or her in-role behaviors and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). If we introduce employee-supervisor guanxi into the model to predict career development opportunities, the previous influence of political skills becomes non-significant, while employee-supervisor guanxi has significant impacts on the outcome variable. The results indicate that employee-supervisor guanxi acts as a mediator between employee's political skills and career development opportunities. Political skills help build the guanxi with the supervisor, which in turn, influences the employees' career development within the organization. Our findings also reveal that POPS moderates the relationship between political skills and employee-supervisor guanxi. The higher the perception, the more likely political skills will lead to a close employee-supervisor guanxi. In sum, the study tests the mediating role of employee-supervisor guanxi and the moderating role of organizational political climate playing in the employee political skills-career development opportunities relation. Results obtained from HLM analyses indicate that (1) in the Chinese organizational context, employee-supervisor guanxi has a unique power to predict employees' career development opportunities. Such findings are consistent with the power distance values in Chinese society (Fei, 1948). (2) Organizational political climate is crucial in influencing employees' organizational behaviors and outcomes. To create a transparent and unbiased environment, Chinese managers should make greater efforts to counteract the influences of organizational political climate.