How Perceived Organizational Politics Influences Emotional Exhaustion: The Role of Psychological Safety and Knowledge Hiding

Abstract

Perceived organizational politics has been a great issue for every organization and is widely discussed in the literature as an antecedent of job stress, turnover intention, reduce organizational commitment, etc. Nowadays due to this pandemic and increasing trend of downsizing in the professional world, there is a decrease in stability of the emotional state. Under the lens of conservation of resources theory, perceived organizational politics is being considered with emotional exhaustion, by taking knowledge hiding and psychological safety as mediators. A cross-sectional study was used with a quantitative approach and collected data was used further to investigate the theoretical framework. Data was collected using online questionnaire surveys.Based on data from 206 employees from the construction sector, we found that perceived organizational politics is a strong predictor of emotional exhaustion. We additionally found that both knowledge hiding and psychological safety partially mediates the positive relationship between perceived organizational politics and emotional exhaustion.Organizations should create a healthy environment and make transparent policies and procedures to minimize emotional exhaustion among their workers. Managers are required to encourage knowledge sharing within their organizations by tying it with organizational rewards (salary incentives, bonuses) and also increase their efforts to foster the targeted reciprocal relationships and interpersonal interactions of employees. Psychological safety can be increased by using the open feedback method and including your subordinates in decision-making.