ABSTRACT
Organizational politics has emerged in the last decade as a field of growing value and relevance for understanding managerial processes. This chapter discusses the empirical assessment of stress-related reactions to organizational politics. It examines the relationship between organizational politics and employees' job distress. The chapter finds a link connecting organizational politics, job distress, and more specific reactions such as aggressive behavior of individuals. G. R. Ferris, D. B. Fedor, J. G. Chachere and L. R. Pondy suggested that organizational politics is a social-influence process in which behavior is strategically designed to maximize short-term or long-term self-interest. Several studies to date have mentioned the possibility that employees' political behavior may lead to various stress-related impacts in the workplace. According to T. A. Beehr, stress can be defined as any feature of the workplace that causes an employee to experience discomfort. C. L. Cordes and T. W. Dougherty suggested four major groups of consequences of job distress and burnout: physical and emotional, interpersonal, attitudinal, and behavioral.
