The storm outside and in : How economic recession enables organizational politics

[Extract] Unfortunately, beyond their macro-economic impacts, recessions also create dysfunction at work. Specifically, economically challenged environments are prone to generate organizational politics in ways that negatively impact employee attitudes and behavior. Economic downturns, for example, inculcate insecurity, which tends to decrease employee engagement and increase employee stress. To help cope with these changes, employees often seek control over their work environments by engaging in organizational politics. Furthermore, the impact of economic downturns provokes organizations to reconfigure their operations to maintain competitiveness. In this paper, we discuss how politics emerge from recessionary environments and subsequently impact work. (See Fig. 1). After highlighting these effects, we discuss managerial implications of this process, along with potential remedies that can shape organizational responses to this dysfunction.