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This edited volume in the SIOP Frontiers series is one of the first to look at the psychological factors behind politics and power in organizations. Noted contributors from schools of management, psychology, sociology and political science look at the theory, research, methodology and ethical issues related to organizational politics and climates. The book is divided into three parts: Part 1 looks at the historical evolution of the field; Part 2 integrates organizational politics with important organizational behavior constructs and/or areas of inquiry, for example in the chapter by Lisa Le.

Theoretical perspectives from accountability, impression management, goal setting, and performance evaluation suggest that accountability conditions may influence whether goals are used for impression management or performance-directed purposes. Goal theory and research suggest that goals typically are performance-directed, resulting in elevated performance under certain conditions. Alternatively, impression management theory might imply that goals may not always be performance-directed, and the goal-performance relationship may be decoupled in such cases. Accountability is proposed as influencing this relationship in addition to main effects on how people approach tasks. Two studies tested notions of how accountability influences task approaches and goal uses: a laboratory experiment with university students, and a field study of telemarketers. Convergence of results indicates that participants approached tasks and set goals differently according to accountability conditions. Furthermore, the goal-performance relationship differences reflect the use of goals for performance-directed purposes under low accountability, and for impression-management purposes under high accountability (with no goal-performance relationship), as predicted.

The present study integrates theory and research on power, politics, and social constructionism to investigate how human resource (HR) departments in organizations gain influence. Survey results from 242 organizations demonstrated that symbolic actions are stronger predictors of HR department power than unionization, HR performance, and top management attitudes. Implications of the results are discussed as are directions for future research.