Selective laser melting (SLM) as an Additive Manufacturing (AM) method has been recently used for the successful fabrication of metal components. Although additive manufacturing provides a flexibility in fabrication of complex geometries, this process might affect properties of the material such as mechanical fatigue life. The traditional methods for fatigue characterization are extremely time consuming and costly. Therefore, the self-heating test, as an alternative fatigue characterization method, is used. This method is based on the assessment of the material temperature variations occurred upon cyclic loading at various stress amplitudes. The principle of a self-heating test protocol consists of submitting a sample to successive series of cyclic loadings (or loading blocks), with a constant stress ratio and increasing stress amplitude, and recording the evolution of the temperature for each sequence. The results obtained from this method was justified for a wide range of conventionally manufactured metallic materials. In this study, the high-cycle fatigue behavior of additively manufactured Stainless Steel 316L (SS316L) by SLM is investigated with the use of a self-heating approach. During cyclic loading, mechanical irreversibility such as microplasticity and fatigue damage occurs, and the corresponding intrinsic dissipated energy leads to a heat generation, called material self-heating. By considering the same origin for the fatigue damage and the one that generates the heat dissipation, self-heating approach can be used to predict the fatigue properties of the material. With the use of self-heating approach, the fatigue limit for the additively manufactured SS316L samples are evaluated. A particular attention has been paid to the identification of the dissipative mechanisms responsible for the self-heating phenomenon. To this aim, different microscopic observation techniques have been conducted: optical microscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Electron Back Scatter Diffraction (EBSD) measurements have been carried out on the surface of specimen after cyclic loading. These observations show that several Persistent Slip Bands (PSBs) emerge, in a random way, at the specimen surface and the number of PSBs increases during cyclic loading. The emergence of PSBs at the surface is linked to the slip systems activation in the grain. The accumulation of microplasticity within these PSB structures leads to the fatigue micro-cracks initiation. Furthermore, for better comprehension, a two-scale model describing the probabilistic apparition of micro-plastic inclusions in an elastoplastic matrix is developed. It permits to reproduce self-heating results and then, by choosing an adapted fatigue criterion, is able to predict fatigue properties of the samples.