Organisational Politics and the Performance of Employees of Bekwai Municipal Assembly

Abstract

Organizational politics has become a common life experience in numerous corporations across the globe whereas, the concept of organizational politics has become a recent topic of debate in modern management literatures. Existing literatures suggest that the perception of organizational politics negatively influence employees’ performance in the workplace, and these negative influences can be reduced by numerous mitigating factors. The study examined the effect of organizational politics (existence of dominant players, organisational reward practices and political behaviours) on the performance of the employees of Bekwai Municipal Assembly. One hundred and seven (107) employees were the respondents for the study. Explanatory research design was adopted and random sampling technique was used for the selection of the respondents. The adoption of quantitative research approach made it possible for the application of statistical techniques for analyzing the primary data. The study adopted descriptive statistics (frequency and percentages), and inferential statistics (regression) to analyse the data. The researcher first conducted normal distribution test for the variables to establish the normality of the data. The study revealed that the existence of dominant groups at Bekwai Municipal Assembly significantly and positively influenced employee performance. Also, organizational reward practices significantly and positively influenced employee performance. Political behaviours at the Bekwai Municipal Assembly significantly and positively influence employee performance. The study therefore recommended that organizational reward practices should be implemented more effectively since it was found to be the highest contributor of employee performance at Bekwai Municipal Assembly. In essence, providing employees with rewards serves a form of motivation and is an essential way of improving their performance. Overall, the assembly should put measures in place to ensure the existence of dominant groups, organizational reward practices and political behaviours are all geared towards achieving organizational goals as these are essential ways of improving employee performance.