An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Political Skill, Workplace Ostracism And Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Career life is an important part of everyone’s life; a good relationship in workplace is critical. It helps to achieve personal development and organizational goals, but unfortunately workplace is fullfilled with a variety of adverse interpersonal interactions, such as workplace ostracism. Although the ostracism is common in the workplace, the phenomenon hasn’t caused scholars’ enough attention, nor caused the managers’. However, the employees’physical and mental health, working attitude, working behavior are far-reaching affected. Meanwhile, teamwork is much more important in nowadays flatter organizations and bad relationships will directly affect the personal, team and the organization performance. Therefore, it is necessary to study "workplace ostracism" in depth. In the few existing studies, most of the researches focus on the consequences of workplace ostracism, while the mechanism of action between workplace and different variables has not been studied in depth. In the few researches which focus on the antecedents, most are from the perspective of employee personality. To make up for gaps of existing studies, this paper chose political skill as the independent variable in the workplace ostracism, and explore the affect of harmonious interpersonal relationship, alertness to the situation, mianzi operations, machiavellian application, and social ability on the workplace ostracism; selected organizational citizenship behavior as the dependent variable of workplace ostracism, exploring how workplace ostracism works on staff behavior. In addition, based on existing research, employees may have different responses patterns, in order to find out why employees have different behavioral responses, this paper put locus of control as moderator to see how external controlled and internal controlled employees behavior differently.This paper consists of six parts. The first part is introduction. Mainly based on the analysis of research background and significance, it points out research questions and research objective, and then introduces the research methodology, structural framework, and finally expounds the innovation points in this paper. The second sector is a literature review. In this part it reviews literatures that relevant to workplace ostracism, political skills, locus of control and organizational citizenship behavior, and then makes a brief evaluation of those literatures which providing a theoretical basis for the following research. The third part of this paper is to propose the research design, research framework, hypotheses, and the measuring of the variables. The fourth part is the pre-survey, considering the scales used in this study are pretty new and three of them are foreign scales, so it is necessary to launch a pre-survey to test the applicability of the scale. During the pre-survey,100questionnaires are collected and92are effective. By the reliability and validity test, after removing the questions with low effectiveness the formal questionnaire is formulated. The fourth part is the core of this paper, in this chapter, it verities the effects of demographic variables on workplace ostracism, analyzes the relationship between political skills and workplace ostracism and the relationship between workplace ostracism and organizational citizenship behavior by correlation analysis and regression analysis, and then by regression analysis to test the moderating effect of locus of control. The fifth part is the, study conclusions and recommendations. In this section, it summarizes the foregoing conclusions:political skills overall and three dimensions (harmonious interpersonal relationship, alertness to the situation and mianzi operation) have a significant negative impact on the workplace ostracism; workplace ostracism and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB organization directed and OCB interpersonal directed) has a significant negative relationship; locus of control negatively regulates the relationship between workplace ostracism and OCB. On this basis, the paper puts forward the corresponding management recommendations:organizations should to pay attention to the adverse consequences of exclusion in the workplace, and should take appropriate measures to intervene timely. Finalty, it put forwards the shortcomings of this article and future research prospects.This article has the following three innovations:first, it probes into the antecedents and consequences of workplace ostracism. According to the correlation analysis, regression analysis results, indicate that political skills overall and its three dimensions (harmonious interpersonal relationship, alertness to the situation and mianzi operation) have a significant negative correlation with workplace ostracism, but the effect of machiavellian application, and social ability are not significant. Workplace ostracism and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB organization directed and OCB interpersonal directed) has a significant negative relationship. Second, it finds the moderating effect of locus of control. When suffered workplace ostracism, the more external control of the employee, the less he/she does OCB. Locus of control negatively regulates the relationship between workplace ostracism and OCB (OCB organization orientation and OCB interpersonal orientation). Third, according to the previous research, it put forwards the strategy how organizations respond effectively to workplace ostracism, which also provides a reference to human resource management.