Abstract:
Organizational politics is often explained as behaviour aimed at safeguarding the self interest of
an individual at the cost of another and the organizational goals. The issue of organizational
politics is under researched in developing world particularly in the public offices. Above all the
issue of organizational politics has been separately studied from state politics; from which it
originated. This deviation by the western scholars is probably attributed for the mainstream
understanding held over separation of state and politics and the flow of resource ownership and
management from public to private sector. However, the increasing complexity of social and
economic system is pushing party politics (politician) involvement against the long held civil
bureaucracy in the developed world. Contrary to the previous argument, in most of the
developing world, public sectors are under strict control of national politics and subject to
serving politicians purpose of their time. The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of
four perceived organizational politics dimensions; General Political Behavior, Go Along to Get
Ahead, Pay and promotion, and Political Clientelism, as independent variables, on employee
commitment (dependent variable) in selected Gondar city administration public offices.
Perceived organizational politics (POPs) is measured by contextualized standard questionnaire
including additional four items under one variable; political clientelism. Employees affective
commitment was measured adopted from a three dimensional model. Data was collected from
randomly selected 215 employees and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The
result shows General Political Behaviour; Go Along to Get Ahead, and Political Clientelism
negatively associated and, are significantly disturbing employee affective commitment, Pay and
promotion policy as dimensions of organizational politics found insignificant in affecting
employees affective commitment. The study definitively tested the theories in a different context
and contribute o the knowledge of the topic while recommending for further study areas.