Personality and Characteristic Work Attitudes of Persons with High, Moderate, and Low Political Tendencies

Abstract

DuBrin's Office Politics Questionnaire, which measures a person's tendency to engage in office politics, was used in an exploratory study to examine the characteristics of persons with high, moderate, and low tendencies to use office politics. 71 MBA students completed the Office Politics Questionnaire (shortened by subsequent analysis to 50 items), the Mach IV, Rotter's Internal-External Locus of Control, Rosenberg's Self-esteem and social desirability scales, and six single-item measures of work attitude. The Office Politics Scale showed a significant Pearson correlation only with the Mach scale, suggesting that the politics scale may be largely a surrogate for Mach. Descriptive statistics comparing groups scoring high, moderate, and low political tendency on the politics scale suggest that people with high political tendency are somewhat higher in Machiavellianism and (although these differences were not statistically significant), higher in self-esteem, see other people as less competitive than themselves, see themselves as being less satisfied with their work. These are characteristics consistent with those proposed by others.