Political Will Hunting: Antecedents and Outcomes of Political Will

Abstract

Politics pervade our organizational lives. Thus, as Mintzberg noted, to survive and thrive in organizations, individuals need to possess both political skill and political will. However, political skill has received the lion’s share of scholarly attention. With the current research, we aim to advance the field toward empirical and theoretical balance as it relates to political will and its antecedents and evaluate its short- and long-term effects. We draw on social cognitive and social information processing theories and propose that political will is a learned individual characteristic. Furthermore, we extend the motivation, ability, opportunity framework by suggesting that political will interacts with political skill to shape opportunities, which in turn enhance job/contextual performance, and career success. Results across three studies, including five samples from three different cultural settings (USA, China, and Europe), provide support for a social information processing theory perspective, in that perceptions of supervisor political behavior and individuals’ history with organizational politics predict political will. In addition, we find support for the joint effect of political will and political skill on task performance and citizenship behavior, via leader-member exchanges. Finally, we demonstrate that political skill moderates the effect of political will on objective career success (overall and organization-specific) through career engagement. Our research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of political will and its role as an individual difference within an organizational politics paradigm and carries important implications for management theory and practice.