Team Conflict Mediates the Effects of Organizational Politics on Employee Performance: A Cross-Level Analysis in China

The present study expands on the growing literature concerning organizational politics (OP) by assessing the impact of team-level OP on employee performance outcomes as well as investigating the degree to which these effects are mediated by team conflict. The results, based on multilevel structural equation modeling with a sample of 349 employees from 78 firms in China, lent support for a cross-level mediating role for team conflict between political climate and employee performance. Further, moderator analyses demonstrated that political climate acted as a condition for task conflict to trigger relationship conflict. Thus, the results of this study contribute to both the political climate literature and the conflict literature by clarifying the processes by which climate can influence employee performance.