When Politics Walk Into Work: Workplace Political Discourse and Organizational Consequences
本文提出“职场政治话语”这一新概念，将其定义为组织中明确提及党派身份、政治人物或争议政策的对话，并分析了它通过五种路径（四种功能失调和一种有条件建设性）影响组织后果的过程。
Political conversations are increasingly shaping organizational life, yet management research lacks a unified construct for understanding this phenomenon. We introduce workplace political discourse (WPD): episodic interpersonal communication in organizational settings that explicitly references partisan identities, political actors, or contested public policies. We delineate WPD's conceptual boundaries, distinguish it from six adjacent constructs, and specify three dimensions—behavioral, relational, and content—along which episodes vary. We propose a process model identifying five pathways through which WPD generates organizational consequences: four dysfunctional pathways (identity threat, resource depletion, self-censorship, and grim expectations) and one conditional constructive pathway that operates when communicative action and enabling conditions are present. Emerging evidence suggests that employees self-select into political discussions often with politically similar coworkers, meaning costs fall disproportionately on political minorities who suppress rather than express. We conclude with a research agenda targeting macro-to-micro translation, pathway differentiation, constructive versus dysfunctional conditions, and construct measurement.