Chapter 1: Workplace Politics and Well-Being: An Allostatic Load Perspective

Over the past 40 years, research examining workplace politics has flourished. The large body of research that has emerged has provided consistent evidence that exposure to workplace politics has deleterious effects on employee outcomes, including job performance, work attitudes, and well-being (see Chang, Rosen, & Levy, 2009). During the same time period, a number of empirical and theoretical advances in the work stress literature have served to enhance our understanding of how exposure to stressors at work affects employee well-being. For example, theories in the work stress literature have evolved to explain specific conditions (e.g., high job demands and uncertainty) that are likely to elicit a stress response from employees, as well as factors (e.g., high levels of control and coping resources) that are likely to mitigate these influences (Hobfoll, 2001; Karasek & Theorell, 1990). Similarly, organizational scholars have made advances in understanding the role of physiological reactivity in explaining underlying processes that link exposure to work stressors to worker well-being (Ganster & Rosen, in press). Drawing from these vast literatures, we develop a framework (see Figure 1.1) that (a) explains how exposure to workplace politics affects employee health and well-being over time and (b) identifies factors that serve to mitigate these influences.