The roles of organizational politics and fairness in the relationship between performance management systems and trust

Abstract

© 2015 American Accounting Association. All rights reserved. Organizational politics is ubiquitous in organizations. Yet to date, no prior research has investigated, in a systematic empirical manner, the mediating role of organizational politics in performance measurement systems. The primary purpose of this research is to investigate if perceptions of organizational politics mediate the relationships between performance measures and employees’ trust in their superiors. As organizational politics may also affect employees’ perceptions of fairness, a model is used to investigate (1) if performance measures affect organizational politics; (2) if organizational politics, in turn, affects procedural and interpersonal fairness; and (3) if fairness perceptions subsequently affect trust in superiors. Based on a sample of 104 responses, the partial least squares results indicate that organizational politics and fairness perceptions significantly mediate the nonfinancial performance measures and trust relationship. In contrast, the results indicate that the mediating effects of organizational politics and fairness on the relationship between financial performance measures and trust are generally insignificant.