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Organizational politics

Published on July 1, 2012 Reviewed on February 25, 2021   37 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hello. My name is Chris Rosen, I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Management in the Sam M Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. I study organizational politics. I have been doing research on this topic for the past decade and the presentation that I'm going to give today, I'll tell you some things that I've learned in the course of my studies and describe some ways that you can manage politics in your organization.
0:26
This presentation is organized around five basic sections. In the first section, I define organizational politics. Organizational politics is a complex topic and several concepts fall under the umbrella of organizational politics. I begin by setting the stage and providing a foundation for understanding what's being referred to when I talk about politics at work. In the second section, I discuss the relationship of politics to work stress. In the popular press, politics at work have often been linked to stress. They've been described as a stressor in the workplace. I'm going to talk about what the academic literature says about this. In the third section, I'm going to present a stress-based model of politics at work to describe how employees react and how they're affected by their experiences with politics in the workplace. Then I'll identify how organizations, supervisors, and individual employees can manage politics at work so that they don't have negative effects on them. Then finally, I'll present some conclusions that are drawn from this presentation.
1:34
Over the past two decades, organizational scholars have directed a substantial amount of time and effort towards studying organizational politics. These researchers have identified a number of important constructs that relate to the social and political environment at work. In the following section, I define organizational politics and discuss three of the most popular constructs to emerge in this field.