Organizational Politics and Bank Frontline employee Outcomes with the Mediating Role of Work Engagement

The purpose of the study is to investigate the organizational politics and its outcomes with the mediating role of work engagement. Data was collected from 250 employees of the private banks of Rawalpindi/Islamabad through questionnaire. Data was analyzed through correlation and structural equation modeling. The result reveales that organizational politics has a significant and negative effect on the work engagement, while work engagement has a significant and a positive effect on the organizational commitment and extra role performance and negative effect on turnover intentions. Work engagement plays a partial mediating role among organizational politics and organizational commitment and turnover intention. Practical implications of the findings, as well as future recommendations are suggested.

The success of the organization depends up on the performance, attitude, hard work, loyalty and the sincerity of the employees. When people inclined more toward success the more they involve themselves in politics. In a fast changing environment success is not only rests with dedication and hard work but employees have the power to influence and get what they want to have, this thing had a lot of influence on the performance and the turnover of the employees. Organizational politics is the growing phenomena and the most debatable topic of these days. The study on the organizational politics has been increasing from the last few decades (Gull & Zaidi, 2012). Mayes and Allen (1977) described organizational politics as the management of links/power to gain the goals which are not approved by the organization. Politics in the working environment is based on the contentment and the discontentment with the work by the employees. The more the employees involved in the work they show more contentment and less involvement shows more discontentments.
The performance of the employees always got affected by the environment of the organization. Sowmya and Panchanatham (2012) concluded that workplace politics can be studied in different perceptions and they conducted it with the turnover intensions of the employees. There are many variables involved which got affected by the organizational politics. Results are in both way i.e. negative and positive. In turnover, the organizational politics had a negative effect. And in the response of the employees are ready to leave the organization. Politics affects the job outcomes i.e. turnover intentions, job satisfaction and stress (Poon, 2003). According to Poon (2003), employee with high level politics experience more negative job outcomes as compare to employee with low level of politics. Perception of organizational politics affects various job outcomes like satisfaction, job burnout, job stress and job commitment whereas social support moderates the relationships (Vigoda-Gadot & Talmud, 2010).
Numerous studies have been conducted on organizational politics and job outcomes but very few are conducted in Pakistani context. Moreover, one study by Karatepe (2013) took work engagement as a mediator between the relationship of organizational politics and job outcomes. He collected the data from senior managers. However, Karatepe (2013) suggested that the study that data must be collected directly from frontline employees instead of collecting data from senior managers. Moreover, he collected the data from hotel industry. The current study was an attempt to follow the suggestion of Karatepe (2013) and focus on identifying the relationship between organizational politics, work engagement, organizational commitment, extra role performance and turnover intentions. Further the study explored the mediating role of work engagement. The topic is getting importance day by day due to a general rising trend in the practical environment. Organizational politics have both positive and negative impacts on the environment and the employees are getting directly affected by the phenomenon.