The present research was developed to examine the conceptualization and measurement of the political skill construct and to provide validation evidence for the Political Skill Inventory (PSI). The results of three investigations, involving seven samples, are reported that demonstrate consistency of the factor structure across studies, construct validity, and criterion-related validity of the PSI. As hypothesized, political skill was positively related to self-monitoring, political savvy, and emotional intelligence; negatively related to trait anxiety; and not correlated with general mental ability. Also, the PSI predicted performance ratings of managers in two samples. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are provided.

Political skill is a construct that was introduced more than two decades ago as a necessary competency to possess to be effective in organizations. Unfortunately, despite appeals by organizational scientists to further develop this construct, it lay dormant until very recently. The present article defines and characterizes the construct domain of political skill and embeds it in a cognition—affect—behavior, multilevel, meta-theoretical framework that proposes how political skill operates to exercise effects on both self and others in organizations. Implications of this conceptualization are discussed, as are directions for future research and practical implications.

The present study investigates the impact of the political skill of leaders on team performance. More specifically, this study examined the role of leader political skill in the performance of casework teams in a large state child welfare system. Team performance was operationalized as “permanency rate,” or the successful placement of children into legally final living arrangements (i.e., adoption, successor guardianship, or return to natural parents). After controlling for several contextually important factors (i.e., average caseload, average age of children served, average number of team placements, team member experience, leader experience, and team empowerment), leader political skill was found to explain a significant proportion of variance in team performance scores. Implications of these results, as well as directions for future research, are discussed.

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