It is widely accepted today that politics is an unavoidable dimension of organizational dynamics, exerting a substantial impact on a diversity of factors and targets. This chapter, which covers some of the main theoretical and empirical frameworks that cut across the study of politics in organizations, aims to review the literature on the subject. The authors analyze the main theoretical perspectives and lines of research that politics has concurred around, as well as make a broad discussion about the different colorings that the effects of politics can have in an organizational context. With this literature review, they hope to give a more balanced view of a dimension that has been considered the perverse backstage of organizations and the dark side of organizational behavior for years.
TopIntroduction
Although today it is accepted that organizations are political arenas, traversed by a delicate web of strategic interests of their actors (Baldridge, 1971; Bacharach & Lawler, 1980; Ammeter et al., 2002, 2004; Ferris et al., 2019; Fitriastuti et al., 2021), the study of this subject was, for decades, ignored or even approached in a naive way. The first textbooks on organizational behavior completely ignored these subjects or treated them with ostracism, referring to them using brief side notes (Cunha et al., 2003).
In the 1950s, Lasswell (1958) stated it is crucial to understand the political dimension of organizations because it is the only way we would discover the secret of who gets what, and in what way in each social system. Vigoda-Gadot and Drory (2006) noted that despite advances, “little is yet known about the exact nature and limits of such machinations (...), there is a growing need to complete the missing pieces of the puzzle” (p. xi). More recently, Ferris et al. (2019) added that the ignorance of the phenomenon is born of a lack of holistic and integrated vision of the different contributions that, some of them casually, have been advanced.
This undervaluation can be explained by two main reasons: On the one hand, the lens of the rationalist paradigm focused for a long time on the study of organizations, which gave it profound limitations in conceptual terms and in the development of instruments needed to study these themes (Bradshaw-Camball & Murray, 1991). In fact, the social endorsement of rationality and the contributions from disciplines such as management, economics, and engineering, contributed towards making the rational perspective the dominant modus operandi in organizational science in the 20th century.
In fact, the rational vision of organizations as machines is deeply rooted in the postulates of Fredrick Taylor, to those of Herbert Simon, James March, and Richard Cyert (the famous Carnegie group), all of whom reduced the informal and emotional aspects of behavior in organizations to hard-data - because rationally inexplicable - in which power was the equivalent of the exercise of authority and, to a certain extent, synonymous with competence (March & Simon, 1958,1993; Cyert & March, 1963).
In some ways, we are faced with a simplistic conception of Organisational Man, devoid of ambitions and personal interests, working hard towards the common goal. Hence, any human behavior polarized around the exercise of power that escaped formal authority and was outside the organizational arrangements was seen as a destabilizing focus of conflict, highly dysfunctional for the organization. It was seen as a factor in creating negative situations for the functioning of organizations and was seen as the origin of strikes, sabotage, and other individual and collective actions that were easily embodied in protesting attitudes and behavior (Varman & Bhatnagar, 1999).