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Introduction
An increasing number of scholars contend that political behavior plays a critical role in organizational decision making and that organizations are hotbeds of political intrigue (Sharfman, Dean, Mitchell, & Bartkoski, 2009; Child, Elbanna, & Rodrigues, 2010). They have shown that managers engage in political behavior to develop or maintain their power bases and amass support for a particular choice. Many research studies also find that successful decisions require an efficient decision-making process, meaning one in which the process unfolds smoothly and which has been selected in a timely way (Mintzberg, Raisinghani, & Theoret, 1976; Hickson, Butler, Cray, Mallory, & Wilson, 1986). Nevertheless, political behavior has been shown to reduce efficiency (Roberto, 2004) and hence negatively affects decision success (Dean & Sharfman, 1996; Elbanna & Child, 2007b). We cannot, however, generalize these results without an empirical examination in non-Western settings. For example, unexpectedly, Dayan, Elbanna, and Benedetto (2012) indicated that political behavior positively influences decision speed. The authors argue that a possible explanation of the conflict between their results and previous research is their new study setting, Turkey. Hence, it is important to be sensitive to the role of national contexts and examine whether the results of research conducted in the Western settings apply in other countries (such as Tunisia, which is studied in this research), as little is currently known about the influence of national culture on political behavior (Child, Elbanna, & Rodrigues, 2010).
Prior research mainly focused on the main effects, while the interactions between decision processes and contingencies are rarely examined. For example, an important issue still lacking research attention is the role of environmental factors, and how they affect the impact of political behavior on successful decision making. Contingency theories suggest that the decision process-success relationship is shaped by the interrelationships between a range of internal organizational characteristics and external environmental features and therefore closer scrutiny of the environment reveals insights that can reconcile contradictory results of prior research (Shepherd & Rudd, 2014). Hence, we seek to extend research on the strategic decision-making processes by focusing on the possible moderating role of key environmental factors on the relationship between political behavior and decision success. The selected factors represent two levels of...