This chapter is split into four sections. The conclusion describes the broaden picture as well as outcomes of this study. The possible interpretation of the study result and several obstacles that occur while conducting this study are mentioned in the implication and limitation section. Lastly, some recommendations in order to improve or imitate this study field are provided in the further research suggestion section.
Conclusions
Since the beginning, the purpose of the study was to demonstrate that workplace with an atmosphere of organizational politics would affect the level of employee’s job satisfaction in a negative way. Moreover, this study intended to investigate whether the perception of supervisor support among employees would weaken the situation of low job satisfaction rate.
Finally, after conducting this study, there are two results. First, the organizational politics actually has a negative effect on the job satisfaction. And second, the perceived supervisor support does not put neither positive nor negative influence on the relationship between organizational politics and job satisfaction.
Implications
The rapid change of globalization and movement of workforce make organizational politics a very interesting issue, especially in the workplace filled with employees with various nationalities as well as people from all over the world that come and go like the airport. With or without intention, employees will exercise their political skill in their workplace one way or another. Although several studies are done examining the situation of organizational politics, job satisfaction, and perceived supervisor support, but they rarely put a strong attention towards the current situation in the airline industry. This study may not have a significant contribution in terms of theoretical studies, but definitely have several
By examining the Hypothesis 1, it confirms that in the airline industrious companies, specifically in Bangkok, they also face issues of politics activities in the workplace and low level of job satisfaction among employees. This implies that even though this workplace setting is different from other office hour setting, the organizational politics does still exist.
Moreover, the different levels of organizational politics intensity can also affect the overall job satisfaction at different levels. It influences different behaviors and attitudes of the employees. As people in the aviation industry do not spend an entire working day with their supervisors, but instead interact with them during the assigned working shift, the interaction between employees and supervisors are not that close. Thus, when employees face some political activities in the workplace, it may only affect employee’s feelings, but not the overall performance.
In contrast, employees at Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok tend not to think that the perceived supervisor support is not the factor that can improve the negative relationship of organizational politics and job satisfaction as the Hypothesis 2 was rejected. It is interesting to examine why employees do not feel that the PSS is an important factor. First, the researcher implies that the bonding relationship between employees and supervisors in the aviation industry is not so tight. Partially, it is because their office is unlike the traditional office style comparing to others. Employees only come to work when they are scheduled to do so. Therefore, they do seldom spend their leisure time or extra hour after work shift with their supervisors. Furthermore, this implication also applies with the relationship between junior and senior employees. People who have the same date of joining in the company tend to have a closer relationship because they attend the training sessions and going through the on-job training processes together.
Secondly, employees working in the airline industry may have a stronger connection as well as spend most of their working hour with the passengers comparing to the time they
spend with the supervisors while they are on duty. Everyday, these employees meet hundreds of passengers coming to use their services. If they receive continuous positive feedback, this tends to have a bigger impact on their perception and may be a better moderator item to use in the study framework. On the other hand, the perception will go otherwise if the feedback employees regularly receive is in a negative way.
The last possible implication on the denial of perceived supervisor support as a moderator is probably the job context of employees in the aviation industry. These jobs as check-in and boarding gate agent at all levels of seniority require a certain level of independence and self-decision making. For example, employees who are the check-in agents are assigned to stay at the check-in counter as if it is their office location. Whenever there have any difficulties, the agents are expected to solve the problems on their own. Unless there is an urgent case that goes beyond their power of authorization such as upgrading the travel class or unblocking seats at the emergency exit doors on the aircraft, that is when supervisors step in and provide help and support.
Limitations
Regarding to the data collection, measurement scale, and demographics of the participants, some limitations need to be recognized in this study. First of all, the result of this study cannot be generalized in other countries or even other airports in Thailand because the participants do not represent the entire employees who are currently working at Suvarnnabhumi airport. Furthermore, since the researcher used the convenience sampling method to conduct this study, this may also restrict in generalizing the result. It is hard to generalize the conclusion to other check-in and boarding agents working in different airports.
Another limitation of this study is the bias effect from common data source since the data was collected from self-reported questionnaire. Plus, the data was also collected based on personal perception of individuals. To address this concern, the questionnaire was
anonymous and the measurement scale was designed as 7-point and 5-point Likert scales.
The last limitation is regarding to the questionnaire items. It can only measure organizational politics, job satisfaction, and perceived supervisor support at the basic level because all items used in the questionnaire were 1-level questions without any division into different dimensions. Another issue is about the low Cronbach’s alpha of organizational politics that was displayed as .54. Although the reliability of this scale did not reach the minimum standard at .7, the researcher decided to continue using it because this scale has been used widely and repeatedly in many research articles. Hence, this measurement scale has been perceived by others as a well-known and reliable work. However, one possible reason caused the low reliability of the organizational politics scale in this study was that the measurement scale used in this study might not be suitable for Thai people to answer. For instance, the sentence “I feel that pay and promotion decisions are consistent with policies”
might be too vague and direct for Thai people who tend not to speak out directly, but rather keep quiet.
Further Research Suggestions
Based on the imitations of this study, there are some other suggestions being provided in the section for further researches. Further study in the field organizational politics with a major focus on a workplace with the working shift environment is suggested. Because mostly, people will associate the organizational politics with an office packed with employees sitting in rows and working from Monday to Friday. By examining the organizational politics in the career aspect like check-in and boarding gate agents at the airport, it is not popular and kind of new in the human resource field. However, one obstacle that might happen is that it is difficult finding sufficient literatures and studies that directly discuss about organizational politics in this type of office setting.
In further investigation, it is possible to use a different moderator to test the
moderating effect on the relationship between organizational politics and job satisfaction. In this study, the perceived supervisor support that served as a moderator was not supported in the finding, however, there might be some other variables that have a high tendency to play an important role in altering the relationship between the dependent and independent variables such as the goal orientation. The goal orientation is a self-developed characteristic regarding the natural attribution features such as personality, ability, skill, and intelligence (Janssen & Van Yperen, 2004). The goal orientation is believed to be an important dynamic that influences the performance improvement as well as the confidence that all natural attributions are changeable (Dweck, 1999). Employees with strong characteristics of goal-oriented may be able to make a big progress in their overall job performance quality because they have a clear idea of what is the desired outcome they and their organization aims for. As a consequence, with a feeling of success in job achievement, these employees tend to feel happy and satisfied with their current position, in the other words, their perception towards job satisfaction is in a good level.
Lastly, the perceived supervisor support represented the effect of outside environment, therefore, it is recommended to take some other factors into consideration while investigating predictors and control factors to know individual’s cultural adaption. It is also recommended that further researches collect data and conduct the study that can be generalized in a wider range such as airports in Thailand or airports in other regions.
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APPENDIX
The Moderating Effect of Perceived Supervisor Support on the Relationship between Organizational Politics and Job Satisfaction
Questionnaire
Thank you for your generous participation. This research is conducting for finding out the perceptions
Thank you for your generous participation. This research is conducting for finding out the perceptions