Abstract

Organizations are very commonly viewed as political entities and politics is inevitable and a non-evasive phenomenon, which is why organizational politics has always been a hot topic in the business world. Over the years the phenomenon of organizational politics has been used in lieu of many other negative and pessimistic ideas that its original neutral essence is gone. Now the organizational politics has been tainted with the dysfunctional subtexts and the literature is filled with its negative connotations. One cannot escape the highlighted dysfunctional side of it while reviewing the literature. Literature also suggests that organizational politics can be functional and has a huge tendency to influence the organizational productivity and efficiency. The current quantitative methodologies provide limited ways of measuring the phenomenon comprehensively and look at organizational politics through a tainted narrow lens which is why the dysfunctional side always gets acknowledged while the phenomenon is explored because of the limitation of the measuring instruments.  This paper suggests why and how the qualitative inquiry can be a solution in exploring the phenomenon of organizational politics more comprehensively and why amongst other qualitative inquiry approaches, Grounded Theory is be best suited for exploration of this phenomenon.

Keywords: Qualitative, Quantitative, Organizational politics, Grounded theory, Functional organizational politics, Dysfunctional organizational politics