The concept of political skill has been extensively studied in work and professional life but not yet in social life. To study how political skill relates to social life outcomes, participants engaged in a videotaped interaction in the laboratory that was rated for likeability and intelligence by naïve perceivers and coded for behavior by trained coders. Participants also took the Political Skill Scale (PSI; Ferris et al., 2005) (with workplace references removed) and other personality questionnaires. Finally, ratings from participants’ friends were gathered. Political skill was related to self-rated social life quality, perceiver-rated likeability, and friend-rated positive sociality. When controlling for extraversion, self-monitoring, and social self-efficacy, all relations stayed significant except ones with self-rated social life quality. Results were strongest for the PSI’s subscales for networking ability and interpersonal influence. Sounding confident and initiating topics mediated relations between political skill and perceiver ratings.

Ordinary social life has long been thought to be strategic in nature (Blau, 1964; Goffman, 1959; Rose-Krasnor, 1997). While “strategic” can suggest duplicitousness, we simply mean that the day-to-day behaviors conducted during interactions are often used to advance one’s social goals. In fact, social goals are not always self-serving (Ellen III, 2014); a boss might want a subordinate to succeed or a pastor might try to console a distraught parishioner. These desired outcomes often dictate the kinds of social behaviors initiated and enacted in life (Fishbach & Ferguson, 2007). Because social life is often a complicated landscape of goals and situations, successfully achieving desired outcomes such as being perceived as likeable or socially skilled frequently involves both picking an appropriate strategy and having the right competencies to pull off the strategy effectively. But which social competencies specifically are conducive to achieving outcomes in social life? This article explores competencies originally conceptualized within work life as they are relevant to social life outcomes. Specifically, we consider a construct called political skill, which has been extensively studied in the organizational literature (Kimura, 2015), but less so in other fields. Similar to social life, complex social situations also pervade work life, or the day-to-day affairs conducted in work settings (e.g., business firms). Mintzberg (1985) argued that professional institutions operate like political arenas, because they are often comprised of actors with rival interests. Hence, the term “political” in “political arena” was used to characterize the strategic and typically informal ways conflict (in particular) and social complexity (more generally) are navigated in work life.