Organizational Politics and Employee Attendance

Abstract

Organizational politics has been conceptualized as a source of stress and conflict in the work environment, with the potential for dysfunctional outcomes at both the individual and organizational level. One possible consequence of politics is the exercise by employees of withdrawal behaviors, particularly absenteeism. Further, the likelihood of negative outcomes may be substantially enhanced by the lack of understanding. The present study investigated the extent to which such understanding, measured as tenure working for supervisor, moderated the erceptions of politics-employee attendance relationship. Moderated regression results (after controlling for quality of supervisor-subordinate relationship) provided support for the hypothesis, demonstrating that under conditions of lower tenure working for supervisor, increases in perceptions of politics were associated with lower attendance, whereas no relationship was found between politics and attendance under conditions of higher tenure working for supervisor. Implications of the results are discussed.