Abstract
Despite the universality of self-serving behaviours designed to achieve personal goals in organisational contexts, research on organisational politics has been dominated by western conceptualisations of the construct. Building on the growing interest in understanding the contextualised nature of organisational phenomena, research in the Middle East has examined wasta as a cultural equivalent of organisational politics. Although this research has provided new insights into wasta, its predominantly qualitative orientation and the absence of a validated scale have constrained our understanding of the construct. Accordingly, this study sought to address two-interrelated objectives. First, it developed and validated an organisational wasta scale. Second, it proposed and examined a dual-motivational pathway through which organisational wasta relates to performance; drawing on self-determination theory (SDT) and social exchange theory (SET). Additionally, it examined high-commitment human resource practices as a boundary condition of the organisational wasta-need satisfaction relationship.
Study 1 used both deductive and inductive approaches to generate an initial pool of items. Study 2 examined the validity (convergent, divergent and predictive) of the initial pool of items. The results revealed the scale to have acceptable validity across the three validation tests. Specifically, results of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) revealed a 5-factor solution but three of the factors were dropped because they had fewer than three items. The resulting two factors comprising 16 items were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) which revealed support for the two dimensions labelled ‘wasta to join’ and ‘wasta to advance.’
Study 3 examined the hypothesized relationships and revealed a number of key findings. First, both organisational wasta and politics negatively related to need satisfaction. Second, HCHR moderated the influence of organisational politics but not wasta on need satisfaction. Third, need satisfaction mediated the influence of organisational wasta and politics on intrinsic motivation as well as their parallel influence on workplace gratitude. Fourth, contrary to our hypotheses, neither organisational politics nor wasta related to task performance and OCB through the serial mediation of need satisfaction and intrinsic motivation (SDT-pathway). However, need satisfaction and workplace gratitude serially mediated the influence of both organisational wasta and politics on the two performance outcomes. Lastly, the conditional indirect effects received support for organisational politics through the SET-informed pathway but not through the SDT-informed pathway; and for organisational wasta there was no support for both SDT- and SET-informed pathways.
These findings contribute to our understanding of organisational politics, and its contextualised version, organisational wasta. First, the new organisational wasta scale should encourage theory-informed research. The finding that organisational wasta explained additional variance in the outcomes even in the presence of organisational politics underscores the utility of the construct. Second, the findings demonstrate the utility of need satisfaction as a conceptual liking pin integrating the dual-motivational pathway of SDT and SET in accounting for the influence of organisational wasta and politics on performance outcomes. Specifically, the results revealed SET but not SDT as a stronger motivational pathway. Third, support for the conditional indirect effect of organisational politics but not wasta revealed that HCHR mitigates the negative influence of organisational politics but not wasta on the performance outcomes. In addition to documenting a subtle difference between the two forms of self-serving behaviours, the moderating influence of HCHR that we uncovered contributes to theory development by highlighting when these behaviours relate to their outcomes.