Privilege-seeking activities in organizational politics and its effect on more productive employees

Arbeitspapier

The ability to accurately evaluate an employee would seem to be a key activity in managing Information Technology (IT). Yet, workers may engage in dishonest and misleading behavior, which distort the evaluation, a variation of organizational politics. Why would they do so? One hypothesis is that privilege-seeking, that is, managing one's managers (also called rentseeking, management relations, or organizational politics), can be used by a worker to misrepresent his actual contribution. These activities lead to a reduction in productivity and consequently to a loss of profits. Management may decrease the firm's losses by engaging in costly monitoring activities. It is paradoxical that a behavior with such negative consequences is tolerated. A model is developed to show that an organization should be composed of employees with different levels of productivity; moreover, it may be optimal for the organization to have some employees who are good at privilege-seeking activities, forcing the remaining workers to invest in productive activities. This contradicts existing theory that unequal compensation should be less motivating and the remaining workers less productive.

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• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Working Paper ; No. 2011-23

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft
• Subject: employee evaluation ; equity theory ; influence costs ; management relations ; multiple agent model ; monitoring ; Nash equilibrium ; privilege-seeking activities ; rent ; rent-seeking ; Arbeitsproduktivität ; Personalbeurteilung ; Rationales Verhalten ; Rent-Seeking ; Nash-Gleichgewicht ; Agentenbasierte Modellierung ; Theorie

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Epstein, Gil S. ; Herniter, Bruce C.
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Bar-Ilan University, Department of Economics
• (where): Ramat-Gan
• (when): 2011

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/96004