Do Personality and Organizational Politics Predict Workplace Victimization? A Study Among Ghanaian Employees

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Do Personality and Organizational Politics Predict Workplace

Victimization? A Study among Ghanaian Employees


Kwesi Amponsah-Tawiah 1, Francis Annor 2,*
1 Department of Organization and Human Resource Management, University of Ghana Business School, Legon, Accra, Ghana
2 Department of Psychology, University of Ghana, Legon, Accra, Ghana
articleinfo
Article history:
Received 7 November 2015
Received in revised form
16 June 2016
Accepted 10 August 2016
Available online 20 September 2016
Keywords:
Ghana
organizational politics
personality
workplace victimization
abstract
Background: Workplace victimization is considered a major social stressor with significant implications
for the wellbeing of employees and organizations. The aim of this study was to examine the influences of
employees’ personality traits and organizational politics on workplace victimization among Ghanaian
employees.
Methods: Using a cross-sectional design, data were collected from 631 employees selected from diverse
occupations through convenience sampling. Data collection tools were standardized questionnaires that
measured experiences of negative acts at work (victimization), the Big Five personality traits, and
organizational politics.
Results: The results from hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that among the personality
traits neuroticism and conscientiousness had significant, albeit weak relationships with victimization.
Organizational politics had a significant positive relationship with workplace victimization beyond
employees’ personality.
Conclusion: The study demonstrates that compared with personal characteristics such as personality
traits, work environment factors such as organizational politics have a stronger influence on the
occurrence of workplace victimization.
_ 2016, Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute. Published by Elsevier. This is an open access
article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
1. Introduction
Over the past few decades, workplace victimization has
emerged as a very important area of research in occupational
health psychology and management studies. Workplace victimization
is defined as a situation in which one or more employees use
either their words or actions or both against another, so as to cause
physical or psychological harm in the work environment [1]. The
phenomenon has been studied under different construct labels
including abuse [2,3], interpersonal conflict [4], incivility [5], petty
tyranny [6], social undermining [7], and bullying [8].
Workplace victimization can be perpetrated by both supervisors
and coworkers, some ofwhommaybe victims of bullying [9,10]. Acts
of victimization at the workplace may range from minor abuses to
major actions such as physical aggression, and are usually perpetrated
to put the victim in an underprivileged position by adopting
actions such as verbal aggression, criticisms, rumors, and humiliations
[11]. These behaviors do not only affect the victims but also
have an adverse effect on the overall performance of organizations.
For instance, bullying is known to cost organizations high employee
turnover, expensive lawsuits, low employee commitment, employees’
absence fromwork, and low employee job satisfaction [12e
14]. On an individual level, workers are also affected physically,
emotionally, and mentally with related health issues such as severe
headaches, depression, and loss of appetite [15,16].
Much of extant research on antecedents of workplace victimization
has focused on the role of the work environment and victims’
personality traits. The work environment hypothesis suggests that
workplace bullying can be traced to interpersonal conflict resulting
from poor psychosocial working conditions [17]. Empirical research
on this hypothesis has shown significant association between
workplace victimization and a number of situational factors within
the work domain [18,19]. An important factor in this regard is
organizational politics, which is defined as “behaviors that occur on
an informal basis within an organization and involve intentional acts
of influence that are designed to protect or enhance individuals

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