Impact of organizational politics on employee outcomes: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Workplace politics is a growing area of business research. The present study aggregates the extant literature on workplace politics and identifies themes to develop a comprehensive understanding of the field. Based on a portfolio of 68 studies collected from different electronic databases, an extensive systematic literature review was undertaken following Rowley & Slack’s methodology. The study segregates the organizational politics literature into antecedents, consequences, and boundary conditions. Furthermore, antecedents, consequences, and boundary conditions are discussed from the individual, job, and organizational levels. Based on the identified themes, the study proposes a conceptual model and future research directions that scholars could use to guide practitioners in making organizations a better place to work.

Keywords:

• Organizational politics
• employee outcomes
• perception of organization politics
• perception of politics
• systematic literature review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Appendix A. Summarized view of workplace politics and employee outcome literature.