Organizational politics on employee performance: an exploratory study on readymade garments employees in Bangladesh

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of organizational politics on the performance of readymade garments employees in Bangladesh. The other purpose is to empirically test the hypothesized relationship of the research framework. This study also highlighted some propositions to guide future empirical research. Design/methodology/approach – The survey instrument was administered on 250 employees. This paper develops a measure for exploring the organizational politics on employees' performances included with employees' commitment as a mediating variable. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to extract and test the key influential attributes on the basis of data of total samples respectively. Structural equation model was also used to define the structure of influencing attributes and to measure the degree of impact for each attribute on the employees' performances. Findings – The result shows that the organizational politics affect most significantly towards employees' commitment and as a consequence affect on employees' performances as well. On the other hand organizational politics does not have any significant impact on employees' performance. Research limitations/implications – This research used convenience sampling procedure which is the main limitation of this study. Future studies could use stratified random sampling procedure with more samples. On the other hand the EFA is difficult to generalize to a larger audience, and there was a lack of experimental control for the questionnaire investigation, so the quality of questionnaire cannot be ensured. Practical implications – It is hoped that the findings of this study will assist the government, NGO and garment industry owners to better understand their employees. Originality/value – The added value of this paper is to link theory and practice, and explore the organizational politics and employees' performance. Few studies have conducted over the years under this perspective in the Bangladeshi environment. Moreover, this is a relatively new issue that remains largely under researched given the developing country perspective.