Political Skill Inventory – 12-Item Sales Adaptation

What it measures

A 12-item adaptation of the Political Skill Inventory (Ferris et al., 2005) for intraorganizational sales research. Measures four facets of political skill: social astuteness (reading social dynamics and motivations), interpersonal influence (adaptive and effective communication), networking ability (building strategic alliances with influential contacts), and apparent sincerity (projecting genuine authenticity). Modelled as a second-order reflective-formative construct. Used to predict intraorganizational relational centrality, which in turn predicts objective sales performance.

Response format

7-point Likert (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree)

Scale items

• I am particularly good at sensing the motivations and hidden agendas of others.
• I understand people very well.
• I have good intuition or 'savvy' about how to present myself to others.
• I am able to communicate easily and effectively with others.
• I am good at getting people to like me.
• It is easy for me to develop a good rapport with most people.
• I am good at building relationships with influential people at work.
• I am good at using my connections and networking to make things happen at work.
• I spend a lot of time at work developing connections with others.
• I try to show a genuine interest in other people.
• It is important that people believe I am sincere in what I say and do.
• When communicating with others, I try to be genuine in what I say and do.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Trimmed from the 18-item PSI (Ferris et al. 2005) to 3 items per dimension; item selection verified by a PSI scale developer. Used alongside social network analysis (eigenvector and betweenness centrality) in a study of 286 salespeople. Political skill predicted relational (eigenvector) centrality but not positional (betweenness) centrality, which was predicted by extroversion. The full 18-item PSI (Ferris et al., 2005, Journal of Management) is the canonical source scale.

Citation

Bolander, W., Satornino, C.B., Hughes, D.E. & Ferris, G.R. (2015). Social networks within sales organizations: Their development and importance for salesperson performance. Journal of Marketing, 79(6), 1–16.

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