The Information Politics Assessment Scale (Ipas): Developing and Testing an Instrument to Measure and Identify the Information Politics of Organizations

• Main Author: Reed, Richard
• Other Authors: Miles, Grant E.
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Texas 2014
• Subjects: Information; information politics; information artifacts; strategy; organization effectiveness; measurement; models
• Online Access: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500061/

Information politics is a concept widely acknowledged in several disciplines. However, scant empirical evidence exists in the literature that codifies or measures information politics as a construct. This exploratory study developed and tested the Information Politics Assessment Scale (IPAS), a survey instrument that measured individual perceptions of organizational information artifacts as indictors of its information politics. Data collected with the IPAS was examined to investigate the latent structure of the information politics variable, determine information politics models, and explore the relationship between information politics, strategy, and organization effectiveness. A purposive sample of 240 participants from a cross-section of organizations completed the IPAS in an online administration. Exploratory factor analysis generated three factors, labeled Behavioral Flexibility (BF), Environmental Sensitivity (ES), and Structural Autonomy (SA), suggesting three dimensions of the information politics variable. Cluster analysis of aggregate scores on the BF, ES, and SA factors together resulted in determining four distinct information politics models. Crosstab and ANOVA, respectively, enabled explaining the relationship between strategy and information politics, and how it influenced organization effectiveness. This study breaks ground by broadening the theoretical and empirical understanding of information politics in confirming the proposition that an organization’s information artifacts are measureable and reliable indicators of its information politics. Further, it supports the efficacy of the IPAS to identify the information politics model operating in a given organization.