Perceptions of politics and organizational citizenship behavior: political skill and conscientiousness as moderators

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how perceptions of politics (POP) impact individuals' willingness to engage in organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and how this relationship is impacted by individuals' conscientiousness and political skills. Design/methodology/approach Primary data collected from 211 employee working in the consultancy sector in India were analyzed using hierarchical moderated regression technique. Findings The authors found a significant three-way interaction between POP, conscientiousness and political skill in predicting OCB. Presence of high conscientiousness and high political skill alleviates the negative effect of politics on OCB. Research limitations/implications The data were collected from consultancy sector organizations, and thus, generalizability of the results is somewhat limited. Further, self-report surveys are used for data collection. Future studies should use multiple methods to collect data to avoid common method bias. Practical implications The results suggest that to alleviate the negative effect of POP on OCB, practitioners should recruit employees with high levels of conscientiousness and impart training to develop political skill. Originality/value This study attempts to take a holistic person-centric approach to study the moderating effect of personality variable and political skill when examining the linkage between perceived politics and citizenship behavior.