mployee performance is related to constant, quantity and quality of results, reporting at work, effectiveness and efficacy at work. Employee performance is depicted by successful accomplishment of duties as required by the institution or manager, and it is validated by stipulated codes while proficiently and essentially utilizing the wherewithal at hand in a dynamic environment (Mathis and Jackson, 2018). Considering this and putting in mind the emerging issue of employees' performance, it is paramount that managers adopt several of strategies in order to attain notable employees' performance (Mutai, 2017). While the American practitioners and scholars are adopting the major concepts of human resource that are geared in promoting employees performance practices in their organizations, the political skills are being given major emphasizes. As proven by Ferris et al., (2017) and Semadar et al., (2016), political skill shows someone's capability to become a better person through changing their actions, understanding other people's conduct and having an impact on their action in a safe and honest way. A study done by Ferris (2015) shows that people who are politically skilled have personal traits that are more self-assured and exact which is viewed as reassuring. In addition, they don't see social relationship as a bad thing other than a great way to grow career wise (Perrewe et al., 2010). Besides, according to Ferris (2017) political skill includes the ability to grow in numbers and influence social wealth. A good personality among social interaction brings visible results as proven by Baron and Markman (2010). For instance, politically skilled person has the ability to gain network centrality allowing them to gain significant data (Jawahar et al., 2018). Moreover, the assurance and hope put in people that are politically skilled helps in teamwork (Ferris et al., 2015).

Possible moderators and mediators of the relation between political skill and employee performance have been identified, indicating that this association is a positive linear one only under certain conditions. For instance, OCB has proven to be a major factor when it comes to staff accomplishments. In the study done by Aslam and Haque (2011), proves that OCB components improves operation and they consist of; selfless and helping components, components that bring social wealth, components leading to time saving or problem solving and the rest offer socio-emotional care by coming up with cultivating culture and building up self-esteem. Scholars all around the world are cultivating the area of Organizational Citizenship behaviour which aids associations to add their effectiveness. OCB consist of employees' character so that they are considered as the main participants to have a high chance of efficiency/ output in a company through their accomplishments (Deery et al., 2016).

However, there are no empirical studies in Kenya that show the effect of employee political skill and OCB on employee performance in universities and other sectors which this study strived to achieve. In addition, employee performance is a concern issue for all organizations; most Kenyan universities have faced challenges in the performance of employees (Samuel and Chipunza, 2009;Ovadje, 2009;KIPRRA, 2015). This is regardless of the fact that they are even made to have a proper understanding of a full and current work description and job values. Usually there is low performance as employees are estranged which limits their ingenuity and inventions. Several firms have failed to reach the required level of productivity like reduced labour turnover, relinquishment of conflicts among administration , high employment and optimum employ motivation. Atieno, Patrick and Ogweno, (2014) attest that it is perplexing as to why this unwanted light lingers although political expertise and OCB has been incorporated in some organizations of tertiary education and has undergone various impediments like high labour turnover, reduced enrolment including lacklustre among staff. There is barely any knowledge concerning how personnel might react to their organization's political skills on employee performance. Therefore, the key purpose of this research is to evaluate the moderating effect of organizational citizenship behaviour on the relationship between employee political skills and employee performance in Kenyan Universities; II.

As attested by Ferris, Tread way et al., (2005) employee political skills have been described as the capacity to successfully comprehend the rest at the work place, as well as putting this know how to use in impacting the rest to behave in ways that improve individual as well as firm rationales. Therefore, politically apt persons put together social intelligence and their ability to cope with dynamic situational requirements in a way that seems to be genuine, stimulates trust and support and sufficiently impacts and regulates the reaction of others. Political skills, therefore is based on proficiencies that are revealed in job related scenarios, which shines light on situation volatility as well as attitudinal determinants. On the other hand, the variance due to attitudes is stronger; the variance due to situations can be influenced.

Individuals with weak political skill are more inclined to capitalise on institutional response practices for instance coming back or engaging in defamatory behaviour given their inferior understanding in making use of alternative influence techniques for instance being civil. Harrell-Cook Ferris and Dulebohn (1999) discovered that those well versed with political skills employ tactics such as flattery to attain their objectives, which in this instance would be to ensure just treatment. Indeed Tread way, Ferris, Duke, Adams and Thatcher (2007) realised that managers who perceived staff with superior political skill employing persuasive techniques and found it to be a sincere attempt while those who have low political skill using persuasive techniques as an outright attempt to coerce for self-serving intentions and thus have fewer odds at attaining their objectives.

Dennis Organ who coined the term "Organizational Citizenship Behaviour" (OCB) defined it as individual habit that is not acknowledged by the official reward scheme, and that encourages the efficient operation of the establishment (Organ, 1997). In line with Khalid et al., (2009) understanding, OCB is an extra-role practice that is any practise beyond institutional requirements. rather its practice depends solely on the consent of employee as a consequence of the organizational internal environment. The employee's behaviour roots in his job devotion on the belief that his discretionary behaviour will be helpful to the growth of the institution (Sun et al., 2007). As such, he makes further trials at enhancement and development of the establishment, Cardona et al., (2004).

Though not officially compensated for by companies, it can bear various significant advantages for the establishment and play a card in gaining competitive edge (Hackett et al., 2003).

It would then be crucial that administrators and staff be nudged to boost their staff voluntary endeavours in establishments, on the presumption that such tendencies generate a conducive work surrounding, supports the company's vision and encourages enhanced job results (Vigota-Gadot, 2007; Le Pine et al., , 2002;Organ et al., , 2006). According to Ahmed, (2011), OCB is described as job linked practices that are arbitrary, not associated with the official company remuneration system, in addition on average, boost the efficient operation of the company. Furthermore, OCB stretches past the determinants of performance as expected by the company in an official staff outline. It also depicts the activities taken up by staff that extend the minimum responsibility demands as required by the organization and promote the welfare of co-workers, work groups, and/or the organization (Lovell et al., 1999).

Employee Political skill can be conceived as a personal resource (Hochwarter et al., 2006) letting employees attain objectives by proficiently banking on individual and communal assets; it is an individual resource that ensures the safety of public resources. When met with stressors, politically skilled individuals do not feel the impact as strongly as the less politically skilled staff (Perrewé et al., 2004). Judging from current scientific and theoretical work, McAllister et al., (2016) contended that political skills improve the social influence procedure in three levels: recognition of opportunity, prospect evaluation and prospect capitalization. The social astuteness and interactive capacity of politically skilled workers helps them become more socially embedded, which in-turn leads to more opportunities to influence co-workers towards performance and other organizational benefits.

Allen and Meyer (1996); Mathieu and Zajac, (1990); McFarlane and Wayne, (1993); Haque and Aslam, (2011) contend that the influence of employee performance on OCB has been a well-analysed subject. Several analyses have demonstrated the positive relationship between OCB and employee performance. EC was deemed as an OCB covariate (Scholl, 1981;Wiener, 1982). Based on Meyer, et al., (2002), in a systematic review of the determinants, correlates and implications of organizational commitment, employee performance (? =.32) correlated positively with OCB. Further EC was considered a crucial component for forecasting extra-role practices, for instance OCB (Scholl, 1981;Wiener, 1982). Freud (2004) investigated the correlation between employee performance and OCB among lawyers in the private industry.

The findings revealed that there is a significant relationship between OCB and employee performance. Nonetheless, it should be observed that specific enquiries are yet to realise any relationship between OCB AND EC (Williams and Anderson, 1991; Shore and Wayne, 1993). Regardless of these inconclusive outcomes, it is usually held by scholar-experts as well as scientists that more study findings backing a definitive association between employee performance and OCB offers credit to the belief that employee performance has correlation with OCB.

Few particular researches, associating EC to OCB have been carried outside the Western context (e.g., Chien and Su, 2009 A meta-analysis carried out by Chang, Rosen and Levy (2009) assessed a framework that associated observed institutional politics with job performance (including contextual performance as is OCB) from several publications released between 1989-2007. Employing content analysis for the purposed of establishing categories, some central ideals were discovered and assessed by use of the structural equation modelling method. Outcomes showed that outlook of institutional politics held a solid definitive linkage with stress and aims of leaving a company and solid negative links with employee efficiency and affective performance. The study also included precise support for the association between observed organizational politics and an element of job efficacy, organisational citizenship behaviour, which had previously not been tested by more researches (Chang et al., 2009).

According to Li and Kong (2015) discoveries, employees' political skill is substantial in interacting with their superintendents in addition to boosting their OCB. The publication also indicates that the mitigating impact of POP is not outright when dealing with LMX, when assessing new age employees, many administrators realize that their long term management expertise is insufficient in applying to this cluster of new age staff. Thus, the study hypothesized; H o1: Organizational citizenship behaviour has no significant moderating effect on the relationship between employee political skill and employee performance in Kenyan Universities III. The social exchange theory and the custom of reciprocity describe the metaphor of sustaining the balance of social exchange between workers and the firm. Some scientists have implied that OCB falls into criteria. The first entails practices that explicitly influence the equilibrium of social exchange between staff and the firm, that is, OCB aimed at the organisation (OCBO). The second criteria consist of practises that bear an implicit impact and are tailored for individuals (OCBI) (Lee & Allen, 2002;Williams & Anderson, 1991).

Based on a research conducted by Lee and Allen (2002) where they deliberated this position by implying that since OCB is an intentional trial at sustaining the equilibrium in a social exchange between staff and the institution, it is logical to claim that this practice is precisely meant to promote the institution. As such, OCBO is more apt to be a direct function of staff perception regarding the conditions of their job. On the contrary, OCBI, chiefly tackles and pays attention to the individual at the work station. Though it seems to only bear precise consequences, OCBI aids in sustaining a state of equilibrium within the institution, nurturing staff activities. In this way the present research aims to incorporate the publications on social exchange theory by suggesting that OCBs conciliate the association between political skills and essential work results for instance employee performance.

IV.

The study adopted positivism approach. In this study positivism was an applicable perspective because effect of employee political skill and organizational citizenship behaviour on performance of staff was assessed without bias quantitatively. The study demography entailed 6147 academic and nonacademic staff from two high-ranking universities (Kenyatta University and the University of Nairobi) along with two private (United States International University and Strathmore University), (University HR records, 2018; www.4icu.org/ke). The researcher employed systematic sampling to pick out personnel in each university so as to form the sample. This was carried out by selecting each K th value which equals N/n. For example in university of Nairobi, the K th value was 1981/121= 16 thus every 16 th staff was selected. Primary data was obtained from the universities employees using questionnaires. Construct validity was also tested and it involved convergent validity and discriminant validity (Mac Kenzie & Podsakoff, 2011). In this study, the measurement model's convergent validity was evaluated by assessing the average variance extracted (AVE) value. Convergent validity was eligible where constructs attained at least.5 AVE value. In order to compute the coefficient correlations that were attained, the SPSS computer software was used. Coefficient alpha of .7 obtained indicated that the research instruments were reliable and therefore were adopted for data collection. According to Oluwatayo (2012), a reliability index of .7 is considered ideal for the study.

The questionnaire was applied to know the performance of employees in universities. It was validated and developed by Pradhan et al., (2017). Responses were recorded on 5-likert scale, 1=strongly disagree and 5=strongly agree. It had 23 items in all types employee performance they included (Task performance-6 items), (Adaptive performance-7 items) and (Contextual performance-10 items) The high score showed high employee performance and low score showed low employee performance

The study adopted items for the political scale dimensions from Political Skill Inventory (PSI) (Ferris, Tread way et al., 2005). The PSI consisted of forty one items which participants answered by indicating to what extent they agreed or disagreed with each statement about themselves in the workplace on a one (strongly disagree) to five (strongly agree) Likert scale. The mean score of all items within a dimension indicates the participant's proficiency in that specific dimension of political skill. The mean score of all forty one PSI items indicated the participant's total political skill proficiency. Individual political skill within a dimension and overall were defined by Ferris, Davidson, and Perrewe (2005)

Drawing upon previous researches (Podsakoff et al., 1990), this study adopted four measures of OCB aspects; including altruism, courtesy, civic virtue and sportsmanship which are also the study moderating variables. Altruism was measured under scale of helping other members of the organization in their tasks. Courtesy is a proxy of preventing problems deriving from the work relationship. Sportsmanship is accepting less than ideal circumstances; civic virtue was measured under the scale of behaviours that demonstrate a responsible concern for the image and wellbeing of the organization.

Moderation in this study was tested using Hayes model 1 Hayes (2015) method was utilized because it showed how the prediction of the independent variables (interactions of the independent variables and a moderator) improves the prediction (

This section discusses the research findings.The data was also checked for univariate outliers. Four univariate outliers were discovered using a threshold of z = +/-3. 29 (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2006). Two univariate outliers were identified for scores and two univariate outliers were found for scores. The data was tested for multivariate outliers by use of a threshold of the independent value of 2.5 regulated deviations for standardized residuals and by utilizing the category p < .001 for Mahalanobis Distance (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2006). A single multivariate outlier was found using p < .001 criterion for Mahalanobis Distance. The statistics were also tested for significant observations by use of Cook's Distance with a threshold of 1 and DEFITS with a threshold of 2. No influential observations were discovered. Assessments were carried out with and without such outliers and no fundamental disparities in the outcomes were observed. Therefore, all cases identified as outliers were included in the final analyses.

From the findings, employee performance had the highest mean (4.22) followed by employee political skill (3.83) and last but not least, organisational citizenship behaviour (3.80). The standard deviations for the variables were less than 1 indicating fewer variations in the responses. Finally, all independent variables and the dependent variables were normally distributed as shown in Table 1.0 below. From the results in table 1, there is a positive and significant correlation between the independent variables and employee performance. Particularly, the correlation results showed that Employee political skill positively correlates with employee performance (r =.728, ?<.01). The correlation results showed that organizational citizenship behaviour has a positive and significant moderating relationship with employee performance (r =.338, ?<.01) Further, for control variables, only age (r =-.108, ?>.01) showed a negative and a significant correlation. Based on the above results there is an indication of the linear relationship between all predictors on employee performance in Kenyan universities, hence there is need to perform a more sophisticated model such as multiple regression model to show a cause-effect relationship. Statistical assumptions were tested to establish if the data met the linearity, normality, multicollinearity, autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity assumptions. It was on the basis of these results, that the tests of associations and prediction were performed. The findings of the tests of linearity on the table below reveal that the relationship between employee performance and employee political skill is also linear. This suggested non-violation of the linearity assumption. The findings proved that normality of the data was not an issue since tests of K-S and S-W of all the variables were insignificant. Therefore, the data presentation in the review was viable for multivariate review. The results revealed that the VIF values for all the independent variables were under 10 and tolerance values higher than .1. This indicates that for all independent variables, there was no sign of multicollineraity, The Durbin Watson (DW) statistic is employed totest for autocorrelation in the remainders from a statistical regression analysis. Findings demonstrated a positive autocorrelation. Thus the findings implied a significant auto correlated relationship between employee performance and all the independent variables. This suggested non-violation of the autocorrelation assumption. Using Levene's test, heteroscedasticity was analyzed. The results showed that contingent on Levene statistic, homoscedasticity is not a challenge for all the variables, p-value>.05.This actually means that a linear relationship exists and there is no reason for having a non-linear data transformation or otherwise quadratic term to fix.

The regression analysis was performed to test the model fit and to establish the predictive power of models in the dependent variable. Based on Field (2009), even though there are a variety of regression techniques for instance, stepwise methods, forced entry and hierarchical method, the current research employed the multiple regression and Hayes model 1 to test moderation effect. As it vividly demonstrates what the regression model undergoes with the introduction of various independent variables. Therefore the analyst was able to consistently take into account the role played by each predictor variable in elaborating the predictive power of the model. This section provides the findings for the main effects and gradually the relationship effects of the variables in the research. Hayes model 1 findings are presented below in table 2 The results presented in table 2, shows that 14% was explained by the moderation effect of Organizational citizenship behavior between employee political skill and employee performance (R-sq Î?"=.14). From the findings it showed that moderation of organizational citizenship behavior has significant effect on relationship between employee political skill and employee performance (?= .48, p=.00). Thus the hypothesis was rejected. Employee performance is regarded as the successfully execution of roles as per the standards provided by the firm or superintendent, and it is checked on recommended acceptable guidelines while successfully and competently maximizing on resources availed in a dynamic setup. Employee Political skill has been explained as the ability to successfully relate with others at work, and to utilize such wherewithal to encourage others to behave in manners that improve individual as well as institutional objectives. OCB denotes anything that employees prefer to do, instantaneously and of their own wish, which usually lies outside their stipulated job description. The review therefore noted that there is a strong relationship of moderating role of Organizational Citizenship Behaviour between employee political skill and employee performance in Kenyan Universities. The review demonstrated that Organizational Citizenship Behavior considerably modulates employees' performance positively. It not only moderates the employee political skill positively but also correlates positively with employees' performance. This results are backed up by Vigota-Gadot, (2007); Le Pine et al., (2002); Organ et al., (2006) since they imply that it would be crucial that directors and staff be motivated to heighten their employees' voluntary practices in firms and political skill, on the notion that this kind of practice begets a more fitting work surrounding, resulting in enhanced job results and boosts the goals of the firm in general. Sun et al., (2007)

The study also suggests that there exists a significant statistical relationship between employee performance and employee's personal characteristics in Kenyan Universities. It is clear that where workers have proficiency, advanced career growth, well trained, positive outlook, are highly driven among other attributes, their performance is likely to be at its optimum level as opposed to personnel that lack such elements.

This suggests that the employee's performance level is considerable influenced by employee political skill and employee organizational citizenship behavior. Thus, there is need for organizations to nurture personal attributes among employees, more especially on employee political skill elements specifically; proactive personality, social astuteness, networking ability, selfmonitoring and interpersonal influence. Furthermore, there is need to blend the mentioned skills with other factors used in this study majorly, organizational citizenship behavior in order to achieve the organizational goals with proper enhancement and moderation of the aspect of employee politics.

VII.

The study correspondingly recommends that directors or administration of the private as well as public organizations be liable for seeing to it that personnel have the drive to assist others without looking to get rewarded through the spirit of organizational citizenship behavior. With respect to the aforementioned, there is need as well for firms to be keen on whether their staff are content with their work since they are at danger of forfeiting discontented personnel with fundamental skills. In addition, it is of great significance to guarantee their staff career advancement within the firm.

Kenyan university management should promote comprehensive working environments for their employees as this will enhance positive performance. Work environment as a sum of the interrelationship of various factors that exist among the employees and the employers need to be enhanced to moderate the constructs of political skill for positive performance. The study currently has validated the moderated mediation effect of Employee commitment and Organizational Citizenship Behaviour significantly affecting the relationship between Employee Political skill and Employee Performance.

Due to limited research on employee performance in Kenya, recommendations for further research on this field focusing on various sectors is encouraged. Deeper, there is need to further research on the relationship between the temporally employees verses permanent employees of institutions so as to study the levels of political skill, OCBs effects on performance of the two types of term of employment.