To be or not to be political? Racialized cognitive scripts and political motivation

Abstract

How do employees become politically motivated? In this study, we view workplace political motivation as a dynamic cognitive process. We examine how people interpret political experiences at work and form motivations to act politically (or not) by uncovering attribution-based political scripts, which entail learning about political landscapes and motivational pathways. Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative techniques, we first interviewed 40 ethnic minority employees who produced 810 spontaneous causal attributions about their political experiences. We used software-based latent class analysis to identify how combinations of these attributions formed six political scripts relating to political events that had been detrimental or beneficial for participants. We returned to the qualitative data to explore how the content of these scripts reveals different motivational pathways, or tracks, to navigate political environments; we then linked the six scripts to participants’ ratings of political will, measured three weeks after the interviews. We discuss the implications of our findings for scholarship on political cognition and motivation and racialized politics at work. We also provide practical suggestions for how organizations can make workplace politics more racially inclusive.