Political Behavior.

Drory and Romm (1990) suggested that political behavior in organizations will increase whenever company regulations are not available to govern actions behaved by employees. As long as the specific policies for guidance are not sufficient, employees have insufficient clues as to acceptable behavior, consequently, develop their own behavior. Those self-developed behavior are generally centering around self-serving and tend to favor the decision maker.

Drory and Romm (1990) also stated that decision making under uncertainty has been found to be susceptible to political influence. Cropanzano et al. (1995) mentioned that decision makers generally rely upon their own interpretations of the data when the information for decision making is ambiguous. Various interpretation of the same information can result in ineffective decisions that may appear political to people who are not directly involved in the decision making process.

Taylor (2001) mentioned that we are facing the situation of resources scarcity. Same situation happened within organizations, for example, limited promotion opportunity, budgets. By taking the perspective for the nature of organizational politics, self-serving behavior will increase the competition and thus result in political environment. It is impossible for organizations to have unlimited resources, and also, it is impossible to have complete regulation system to govern employees’ every behavior, consequently, political activities may occur in virtually any organization.

Witt, Andrews, and Kacmar (2000) also agreed on the notion that political behavior is an inevitable part of organizational life. Frost (1987) mentioned that anyone who possesses the critical resources could be the probable target of political influence tactics. Given that the organization structure is always developed from the power center, hence, self-serving behavior to favor the power holder gives the birth of general political behavior.