Abstract: There is an important research gap in the current organizational politic research, which can be described as a phenomenon of “social dilemma”. In such social dilemma, employees adopt political behavior to cope with the depression in the work. However, such self-serving behavior would form a kind of political climate in the team, which is expected to hurt individual’s well-being. In order to fill this gap, we built an overall theoretical framework of organizational politic research based on the compensatory control theory. We collect data 5 times with one month interval. A total of 249 employees from 83 teams respond to our survey. We use multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) to test our hypotheses since our data contain a nested structure. Results of MSEM analysisare as follows. In the individual level, role ambiguity leads to physical and mental health problems and more organizational political behaviors through decreasing sense of self-control. Meanwhile, organizational political behaviors reduces the negative impact of internal control exerted on employees’ well-being. In the team level, organizational political atmosphere leads to a series of physical and mental health problems by reducing their sense of self-control. Intra-team competition exacerbates the negative effect of self-control on organizational political behavior, and also moderates the mediating role of self-control on role ambiguity and organizational political behavior of employees. Our study not only identifies an important research gap to be resolved, but also proposes an integrated theoretical framework for future researches. Moreover, managers can rely on our work to further understand organizational politics in the work, which is of help to more effective managerial interventions.

Key words: organizational politics, role ambiguity, sense of self-control, physical and mental health, intra-team competition