The Perceptions of Organizational Politics Scale (POPS)<\/strong> is one of the most extensively utilized psychometric instruments in industrial and organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and management science. Originally developed by Kacmar and Ferris (1991)<\/a> and subsequently refined and cross-validated into its definitive 15-item version by Kacmar and Carlson (1997)<\/strong>, the scale operationalizes organizational politics not as an objective structural feature, but as a subjective cognitive appraisal of self-serving, non-sanctioned employee behaviors. The refined 15-item instrument captures three distinct yet intercorrelated latent dimensions: General Political Behavior<\/em> (2 items), Go Along to Get Ahead<\/em> (7 items), and Pay and Promotion Policies<\/em> (6 items). Administered via a 5-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree<\/em>) to 5 (Strongly Agree<\/em>), POPS provides researchers and diagnosticians with a rigorous tool to assess the degree to which workplace environments are perceived as self-interested, opaque, and divisive versus merit-based, collaborative, and fair.<\/p>\n Psychometrically, the 15-item POPS demonstrates robust internal consistency reliability across varied occupational and organizational sectors, with total scale Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely exceeding .85 and subscale reliabilities typically spanning from .73 to .91. Extensive confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) across diverse multi-sample investigations\u2014including public sector personnel, corporate engineers, human resource managers, and healthcare employees\u2014consistently corroborate the superior fit of the hypothesized three-factor oblique model over alternative unidimensional or orthogonal configurations. Validity studies provide compelling evidence of convergent validity with constructs such as perceived organizational injustice, role ambiguity, and work strain, alongside clear discriminant validity from job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and leader-member exchange (LMX). Decades of meta-analytic inquiries position POPS as a potent predictor of critical workplace outcomes, including heightened turnover intentions, psychological withdrawal, professional burnout, and diminished organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB).<\/p>\n Perceptions of Organizational Politics Scale, POPS, organizational politics, Kacmar and Carlson, workplace politics, psychological climate, organizational justice, job stress, turnover intention, psychometrics, factor analysis, job satisfaction<\/p>\n The modern, standard 15-item version of the Perceptions of Organizational Politics Scale was developed and validated by K. Michele Kacmar<\/strong> and Dawn S. Carlson<\/strong> in their landmark 1997 publication in the Journal of Management<\/em>. The conceptual foundation and the original precursor 12-item instrument were formulated by K. Michele Kacmar<\/strong> and Gerald R. Ferris<\/strong> (1991).<\/p>\n The primary purpose of the Perceptions of Organizational Politics Scale is to systematically quantify an employee’s subjective evaluation of self-serving, non-sanctioned influence tactics and opportunistic behaviors within their proximal and distal work environments. For decades, management theorists struggled to measure workplace politics due to the clandestine, socially undesirable nature of political activity. Because employees and leaders rarely admit to engaging in self-interested maneuvering, measuring objective political behaviors directly presents near-insurmountable methodological hurdles. Kacmar and colleagues resolved this challenge by anchoring measurement in cognitive appraisal theory: what dictates an employee’s attitudes, strain, and behavioral reactions is not necessarily an objective tally of political maneuvers, but their subjective perception<\/em> that politics permeate their organization.<\/p>\n In academic research, the POPS fulfills several vital functions:<\/p>\n In applied organizational development and consulting contexts, POPS serves as a vital climate audit diagnostic. High baseline scores on the POPS frequently function as leading indicators of dysfunctional organizational cultures characterized by low psychological safety, high turnover of high-performing talent, suppressed innovation, and widespread cynicism. Human resource executives and organizational psychologists employ the tool during cultural transformation initiatives, mergers and acquisitions, and compensation system redesigns to evaluate whether published policies are perceived as authentic merit-based criteria or mere bureaucratic facades concealing favoritism.<\/p>\n The construct assessed by the POPS\u2014Perceptions of Organizational Politics (POP)<\/strong>\u2014is conceptually defined as the degree to which an individual views their work environment as characterized by self-serving behaviors, factional maneuvering, subversion of formal policies, and non-sanctioned reward allocation strategies executed at the expense of organizational goals or other individuals. Rather than assessing political skill (the capacity to navigate politics effectively), POPS captures the perceived political climate of the organization. The 15-item revision established by Kacmar and Carlson (1997) establishes that POP is a multidimensional construct comprising three foundational sub-dimensions:<\/p>\n The General Political Behavior dimension measures the perception that individuals or influential coalitions within the organization actively engage in self-aggrandizing, unprincipled, and predatory tactics to build their own power base at the direct expense of others. This facet reflects overt, interpersonally aggressive political maneuvers. It encapsulates an organizational ethos where personal advancement is achieved through sabotage, tearing colleagues down, and the entrenchment of untouchable cliques or cabals that operate above standard accountability mechanisms. Employees who score high on this dimension perceive that self-serving actors dominate the social landscape and that organizational success is fundamentally decoupled from collaborative integrity.<\/p>\n The Go Along to Get Ahead dimension reflects tactical passivity, enforced conformism, and the systematic suppression of dissenting voices. It operationalizes a psychological climate where silence, compliance, and sycophancy are perceived as the only viable strategies for professional survival and advancement. Within this subscale, political behavior manifests not as aggressive posturing, but as defensive maneuvering: employees perceive that challenging the status quo, telling uncomfortable truths to superiors, or failing to agree with powerful stakeholders results in marginalization, reprisal, or career stagnation. This dimension directly links to the psychological safety construct, capturing an environment where ‘yes-men’ thrive while critical thinking and authentic expression are actively penalized.<\/p>\n The Pay and Promotion Policies dimension measures the degree to which organizational reward allocation systems\u2014specifically salary increases, bonuses, and upward mobility\u2014are perceived as politically manipulated rather than governed by transparent, objective, and published merit-based standards. When this dimension is elevated, employees view formal performance management frameworks as hollow rituals. Promotions and raises are seen as trophies distributed through nepotism, personal favoritism, backroom lobbying, and allegiance to powerful figures, rendering formal human resource policies functionally irrelevant. This subscale directly touches upon perceived violations of distributive and procedural justice.<\/p>\n The theoretical architecture underpinning the Perceptions of Organizational Politics Scale is predominantly rooted in the comprehensive framework of organizational politics advanced by Ferris, Russ, and Fandt (1989)<\/strong>, along with subsequent expansions by Kacmar and Ferris (1991)<\/strong> and Ferris et al. (2002)<\/strong>. This framework integrates cognitive appraisal theory, social exchange theory, expectancy theory, and stressor-strain perspectives into a cohesive conceptual model.<\/p>\n At the core of the POPS framework is Kurt Lewin’s classical field theory axiom that behavior is a function of the person and their environment, mediated through psychological perception: $B = f(P, E)$<\/span>. Kacmar and colleagues posited that human beings do not react to raw, unmediated organizational reality; rather, they construct cognitive maps of their environment based on social cues, observed interactions, and systemic outcomes. Organizational politics operates largely in the shadows; hence, individual interpretations of ambiguity dictate affective and behavioral responses. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) transactional theory of stress, a political workplace is cognitively appraised as a threatening, hindrance-laden environment wherein the rules of engagement are unstable, unpredictable, and unfair.<\/p>\n The theoretical model heavily incorporates Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964)<\/a>. In a normative, healthy workplace, employees enter into a socio-emotional contract with the organization: high effort, loyalty, and competence are exchanged for equitable pay, promotion, psychological recognition, and job security. When employees perceive an environment saturated with politics (elevated POPS scores), this fundamental social exchange is ruptured. High political perceptions signal that the psychological contract has been breached; effort and merit no longer yield expected outcomes, because rewards are hijacked by political actors. Consequently, in accordance with social exchange reciprocity, employees withhold discretionary effort, reduce organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), and manifest cognitive and behavioral withdrawal.<\/p>\n Modern conceptualizations of POPS frequently rely on Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory (Hobfoll, 1989)<\/a>. Navigating a political environment requires continuous expenditure of vital energetic, emotional, and cognitive resources. Employees must perpetually monitor social dynamics, protect their reputations, engage in defensive impression management, and guard against political maneuvering by peers. Because resources are finite, the chronic drain imposed by a political climate depletes the employee’s resource reservoir without providing resource replenishment, leading inevitably to job burnout, strain, depersonalization, and eventual turnover.<\/p>\n The Perceptions of Organizational Politics Scale has been subjected to rigorous empirical evaluation across dozens of independent investigations, establishing extensive construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity.<\/p>\n During the 1997 revision by Kacmar and Carlson, content adequacy was formally evaluated using Schriesheim and colleagues’ rigorous quantitative sorting methodology across subject matter experts and independent panels. This process ensured that items distinctly mapped onto the theoretical definitions of General Political Behavior, Go Along to Get Ahead, and Pay and Promotion Policies, eliminating ambiguous or double-barreled statements that had weakened earlier iterations of the scale.<\/p>\n Convergent validity has been repeatedly demonstrated through statistically significant, theoretically consistent correlations with conceptually related constructs:<\/p>\n Confirmatory factor analyses testing multi-trait multi-method matrices and nested latent variable models have confirmed that POPS is empirically distinguishable from related workplace attitudes:<\/p>\n Extensive meta-analyses\u2014such as those conducted by Miller, Rutherford, and Kolodinsky (2008)<\/strong> ($k = 79$<\/span> studies, $N = 25,059$<\/span>) and Chang, Rosen, and Levy (2009)<\/strong> ($k = 118$<\/span> studies, $N = 44,560$<\/span>)\u2014provide overwhelming evidence for the predictive utility of the POPS. Across these large-scale quantitative syntheses, POPS significantly and consistently predicted:<\/p>\n The reliability of the POPS has been established across numerous samples encompassing diverse professional sectors, organizational hierarchies, and demographic cohorts.<\/p>\n In the seminal 1997 multi-sample investigation by Kacmar and Carlson, internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha<\/a>) were documented across several distinct cohorts:<\/p>\n Subscale reliability metrics across subsequent decades of organizational scholarship consistently align with the following parameters:<\/p>\n Longitudinal studies examining the temporal stability of POPS have demonstrated test-retest correlations ranging from $r = .65$<\/span> to $.74$<\/span> over 3-to-6-month intervals in stable work environments. Notably, when substantive structural changes occur (such as a change in executive leadership, organizational restructuring, or the introduction of objective performance auditing), POPS scores shift predictably, confirming both temporal stability in the absence of interventions and sensitivity to genuine organizational environmental modifications.<\/p>\n The structural dimensionality of the POPS has been the subject of extensive psychometric evaluation, transitioning from exploratory factor analysis (EFA) in early development to advanced multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and measurement invariance testing.<\/p>\n The original 12-item instrument published by Kacmar and Ferris (1991) initially proposed a five-factor model that was subsequently reduced to three factors. However, subsequent independent research by Nye and Witt (1993) raised critical concerns regarding unstable item loadings, low squared multiple correlations, and overlapping variance. To address these psychometric vulnerabilities, Kacmar and Carlson (1997) embarked on a three-study overhaul. In Study 1, CFA conducted on 749 state agency employees demonstrated that the original 12 items exhibited suboptimal fit, with several items failing to load cleanly on their intended dimensions.<\/p>\n In Study 2 and Study 3 of the 1997 paper, Kacmar and Carlson executed Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Common Factor Analysis with Oblimin oblique rotation<\/strong> across multiple independent datasets. Oblique rotation was theoretically and mathematically required due to the expected conceptual correlation among political dimensions. In Study 2, across four separate occupational groups, the analyses confirmed that while a three-factor solution was consistently extracted (eigenvalues > 1.0), only a subset of the original items demonstrated primary loadings<\/span> $ge .50$<\/span> with cross-loadings $le .30$<\/span>. Consequently, 14 new candidate items were generated and evaluated in Study 3. Iterative factor analyses retained 15 optimal items demonstrating sharp simple structure:<\/p>\n Structural equation modeling has repeatedly validated the superior fit of the oblique three-factor model over alternative nested models (e.g., a one-factor general model or an orthogonal three-factor model). Across the validation cohorts in Kacmar and Carlson (1997) and modern replications, the three-factor model yields robust goodness-of-fit indices:<\/p>\n Measurement invariance analyses across gender, job levels (managerial vs. non-managerial), and organizational sectors (public vs. private) have established metric and scalar invariance, confirming that the 15-item POPS measures identical latent constructs with equivalent measurement weightings across diverse demographic groups.<\/p>\n The revised 15-item Perceptions of Organizational Politics Scale was published in 1997<\/strong> in the Journal of Management<\/em> (Volume 23, Issue 5, pages 627\u2013658), building upon the original conceptual instrument published in 1991<\/strong> in Educational and Psychological Measurement<\/em> (Volume 51, Issue 1, pages 193\u2013205). The instrument is copyrighted by the original authors and the respective journal publishers (Sage Publications \/ Southern Management Association).<\/p>\n For non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, and doctoral dissertations<\/strong>, the scale is widely recognized as accessible in the public academic domain and may be utilized without financial fee, contingent upon full and accurate bibliographic citation of Kacmar and Carlson (1997). Researchers are not formally required to purchase individual test forms. However, for commercial consulting, corporate assessments, enterprise climate audits, or inclusion within fee-generating diagnostic platforms<\/strong>, practitioners must secure formal contractual permission and licensing authorization from Sage Publications or the copyright holders.<\/p>\n2. Keywords<\/h2>\n
3. Authors<\/h2>\n
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4. Purpose<\/h2>\n
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5. Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. General Political Behavior (GPB)<\/h3>\n
2. Go Along to Get Ahead (GATA)<\/h3>\n
3. Pay and Promotion Policies (PPP)<\/h3>\n
6. Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Cognitive Appraisal and Lewin’s Field Theory<\/h3>\n
Social Exchange Theory and the Psychological Contract<\/h3>\n
Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory<\/h3>\n
7. Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Content Validity<\/h3>\n
Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
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Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
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Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity<\/h3>\n
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\nho = .43$ to<\/span> $.45$<\/span>.<\/li>\n
\nho = .45$ to<\/span> $.48$<\/span>.<\/li>\n
\nho = -.54$ to<\/span> $-.57$<\/span>.<\/li>\n
\nho = -.20$ to<\/span> $-.25$<\/span>.<\/li>\n
\nho = -.15$ to<\/span> $-.22$<\/span>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n8. Reliability<\/h2>\n
Internal Consistency Reliability<\/h3>\n
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Test-Retest Stability<\/h3>\n
9. Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Historical Evolution of the Factor Model<\/h3>\n
Exploratory Factor Analyses in Scale Revision<\/h3>\n
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Confirmatory Factor Analytic Fit Indices<\/h3>\n
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10. Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
12. References<\/h2>\n
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