MEDIATING EFFECT OF PERCEPTION OF POLITICS BETWEEN DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AND TURNOVER INTENTION OF EMPLOYEES IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ORGANIZATIONS

MEDIATING EFFECT OF PERCEPTION OF POLITICS BETWEEN DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AND TURNOVER INTENTION OF EMPLOYEES IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ORGANIZATIONS

During the past few decades, organizational researchers have increasingly focused their attention on the subjective work issues and their impact on various work related outcomes. One of the most prominently studied factor perception of organizational politics has received much recent conceptual and empirical attention. Political work environment are responsible for a variety of harmful work consequences like higher stress, lower job satisfaction and commitment, diminished worker productivity and higher rate of turnover (Ferris et.al 1989, 2002; Kacmar and Baron, 1999) Some researchers focused on the distributive justice aspect as predictors of important outcomes here they pursued studies from the opposite perspective while they examined Perception of politics (Ferris and Kacmar, 1992; Kacmar , Ferris, 1991). Thus research has demonstrated the independent influences of politics, distributive justice, on turnover intention, job satisfaction etc (Cropanzano et.al 1992; Mcfarlin and Sweeney, 1992). Very few studies attempted in finding out how these elements of fairness influence each other in predicting outcomes. In the current study, the mediating effect of perception of politics between distributive justice and turnover intentions has been examined. This study extends the previous research efforts and fills a gap in the reviewed literature by simultaneously investigating the mediation effect of perception of politics between distributive justice and turnover intention of employees in Information technology organizations. 343 employees from the top 10 IT organization as listed by NAASCOM were involved in the present study. The purposive sampling technique was adopted. Employees with minimum 2 years of experience in the organization was chosen as respondents. The major objectives of the study are, to measure employees perception of politics and employees perception of distributive justice; to study the turnover intention of IT employees; to find if perception of politics mediates the relationship between distributive justice and turnover intentions; to find out the significant effect of distributive justice on the dimensions of perception of politics and finally to find out the difference in perception of politics and distributive justice across demographics. Hypothesis was framed in accordance to the objectives stated. The tools of measurement adopted were (i) Perception of organisational politics were measured with the fifteen item Perception of politics scale (POPS), developed by Kacmar and Carlson (1997).( ii) Five item Perceptions of distributive justice were measured with the Distributive Justice Index, developed by Price and Mueller (1986). (iii) Turnover intention was measured using a categorical item developed by Dilys Robinson, Sarah Perryman, and Sue Hayday, (2004). The Crobachs alpha for perception of politics dimensions and distributive justice were above 0.90. The level of perception of politics and distributive justice was found to be moderate. In terms of the logistic regression analysis performed, it was found that there was partial mediation of perception of politics between distributive justice and turnover intention. The result indicated that, even though the employees perceived their work environment to be political, they will have the intention to stay back, as long as the fairness in distribution of rewards exists. Perception of politics which always carried a negative label showed partial mediation in the relationship between distributive justice and turnover intentions, where it explained only 13.9% of the intention to leave factor. This means, even when the environment is political, employees will stay back in the organization when they experience fairness in distribution of rewards. Keywords: Information technology, Organizational behaviour, Human resource management, Perception of politics, Mediation, Distributive justice, Turnover intention.

P Sibila

Management