Effect of Organizational Politics on Job Performance: The Mediating Role of Emotional Intelligence

The motive behind the study is to assess that how employees' performance is influenced by organizational politics and it also aims to evaluate the potential mediation of emotional intelligence between them. Total 292 employees from the banking sector of Pakistan completed self-report questionnaire contains Wong and Law's Emotional Intelligence Scale; Kacmar's Perception of Organizational Politics Scale and William's Task Performance Scale, Dalal's Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Counter Productive Work Behavior Scale for job performance. Baron-Kenny model was used to test mediation supplemented by Sobel test to find its significance. Results indicate that emotional intelligence significantly partially mediates between politics and performance having a significant negative relationship. Study suggests managers to assess political behaviors (which affect the performance of employees) and design emotional intelligence training to reduce their negative relationship. The study witnessed new empirical insight about the interplay of politics-performance and how emotional intelligence mediates their relationship.