Organizational Politics

What organizational politics is

Organizational politics is the pursuit of an aim inside an organisation through means of influence that operate outside the formal chain of authority: building support before a meeting, reaching the decision maker through someone they trust, and arranging how information is presented so that it serves a position.

The term is usually used as criticism, but in origin it is a neutral description. An organisation with more than one department, more than one set of interests and limited resources produces this kind of pursuit by the way it is made up, and no structure is free of it. The practical question is not how to prevent it, but what makes it helpful or harmful, and what widens or narrows the room it has.

Two kinds, not one

Separating the two is the first thing that gets missed, and the rest of the concept rests on it:

• Constructive pursuit. A manager wins colleagues over to a decision they believe is right but cannot impose. Someone with a proposal briefs the person likely to object before the meeting, so as to learn the objection and answer it. Someone with no authority over another department draws on a working relationship to get a shared task done. All of this is necessary in any work that crosses the boundary of one department, because the formal structure gives nobody authority over people outside their own line.
• Harmful pursuit. Withholding information from someone who needs it in order to weaken their position; attributing an achievement to someone other than the person who did it; building a coalition against a person rather than against an idea; presenting only one side of an issue to the decision maker.

The difference between the two lies not in the means but in two things: whether the means are hidden from the people they concern, and whether the position is built on the argument or on the person. Briefing someone before a meeting, done openly, is preparation. Done in secret, with the aim of forestalling an objection rather than answering it, it becomes the other kind.

What widens the room it has

This is where management has something it can actually act on. The room for this kind of pursuit grows with the product of two things: the value of what is being contested, and how vague the criterion for dividing it is. The second is the variable management controls.

Take a budget of SAR 12,000,000 to be divided among 5 departments, with 120, 90, 60, 180 and 50 employees respectively, 500 in total. The figures are assumed to show the structure.

• If the criterion is written down, say each department’s share of headcount, the division is calculated rather than contested: 120 of 500 is 24%, or SAR 2,880,000; 90 is 18%, or SAR 2,160,000; 60 is 12%, or SAR 1,440,000; 180 is 36%, or SAR 4,320,000; and 50 is 10%, or SAR 1,200,000. The amount open to influence is zero. Whatever argument remains moves to the criterion itself, which is a public argument held in its proper place.
• If the criterion is “strategic importance”, the amount open to influence is the full SAR 12,000,000. There is no figure to appeal to, so the advantage goes to whoever presents best, whoever arrives first and whoever knows the decision maker.

A vague criterion does not create the pursuit out of nothing. It raises the return on it, making an hour spent persuading pay better than an hour spent working. That is the economic explanation of what is usually described as “a bad culture”, and unlike the moral description it leads somewhere a manager can act.

Where it concentrates

• Promotions. Who actually gets promoted is the most honest signal of which values are rewarded. That cuts both ways: when the promotion criterion is not published, what actually gets rewarded is proximity to the decision, and people learn that within a single cycle.
• The allocation of visible roles. A project that senior leaders see pays its holder differently from necessary work nobody sees, and handing out the first kind with no criterion is the most frequent site of this pursuit and the least discussed.
• The space between departments. Here nobody has authority over anybody and work gets done only by agreement. This is where the pursuit is constructive most of the time, and the gravest risk is answering it with a ban, which stalls work the formal structure was never able to do.

Who is hurt first

Its effect does not fall on everyone equally, and this is an aspect that concerns HR specifically. The capital of this kind of pursuit is relationships and knowing who decides what, and that capital is built over time. Someone who has just joined has none of it, however capable they are at the work itself.

It follows that an organisation with a lot of this activity produces two effects: new joiners reach normal productivity later, because they have to learn a network before they learn a job; and what they achieve is credited to them only to the extent that they have a way to present it. That is why one of the things employee onboarding does in such organisations is introduce, explicitly, who decides what and who to go to, because what is not said outright is learned from experience, slowly and at a price.

The same effect falls on people who work far from where decisions are made, and on those working in arrangements where they are not present every day. Physical proximity is a means of influence that appears in no structure, and it does its work whether intended or not.

Gauging its intensity without judging anyone

“Do we have organizational politics?” is a question with no useful answer, because the answer is always yes. The question that has an answer is about how much room it has, and that is read from observable things rather than from an opinion about anyone:

• The share of decisions announced with their reasons. This is counted from the decision records themselves, not from impressions.
• Where the decision is actually settled. A meeting that opens with everything already settled beforehand is a sign that the real place of decision has moved outside it. That is not a fault in itself, since prior briefing is useful, as described above. It becomes a sign when the people left unbriefed are the ones the decision affects.
• Whether the promotion criterion is known before the promotion is announced. This is the most measurable item here, because the answer is either a published document or nothing.
• What is told about a past decision. If most people in the organisation know a version of a past decision other than the announced one, the gap mentioned below has already been filled.

What management can do

• Write the criteria for dividing things before dividing them: the budget, the visible roles and the promotions. Every written criterion turns a private argument into a public argument about the criterion.
• Announce what was decided together with why. A decision announced without a reason leaves a gap that gets filled with a political explanation, whether that explanation is right or not.
• Widen who knows. The strongest tool of the harmful kind is a monopoly on information, and it loses its value the moment the information is made available to those it concerns.
• Look at the effect on the channels that carry news. Two signs of low psychological safety are that objections come only from the most senior person present and that questions get asked after the meeting in side groups. Those same two signs appear when harmful pursuit intensifies, and an organisation that reads them as evidence of only one of the two is addressing half the cause.

One limit applies to all of this: complete transparency is not possible. Some decisions have no quantitative criterion, and some information cannot be shared, for legitimate reasons. The aim is to reduce the room, not to eliminate it, and anyone who promises an organisation with no organizational politics is promising something that does not exist.

Whether a particular behaviour is acceptable is judged against the organisation’s approved code of conduct and its internal regulations, not against the concept described here, and nothing is borrowed from the concept to settle it. The budget figures above are assumed to show how the criterion changes the room for influence, and in the sources we reviewed we found none that estimates how much of their time organisations spend on organizational politics.

Reading it against the terms around it

What organizational politics names is a purpose pursued. Each neighbouring term names something else, and saying what that something is shows where each term sits.

A conflict of interest is a situation in which a person has a private interest that clashes with their duty, and organisations have a set procedure for it, disclosure and recusal. The pursuit described here assumes no private interest at all; most of it comes from people who believe they are serving their work. Handling one with the tool meant for the other deals with the situation through the wrong procedure. A code of conduct, likewise, covers only the behaviour it actually names. The rest is behaviour to be managed, not a breach to be investigated, and stretching the label to every informal influence turns the code into a text nobody can apply.

Organisational culture is the set of unwritten rules that apply to everyone, while this is the conduct of individuals pursuing different aims. Culture is what decides which forms of the pursuit are acceptable. Informal communication is the movement of news outside the approved channels and the chain of command, so its subject is the route the news takes, while the subject here is the goal being pursued. A piece of news passed between two colleagues with no purpose beyond telling is the first and nothing of the second, and a campaign for a decision run entirely through formal meetings and approved correspondence is the second and nothing of the first. The informal channel is often a tool of the pursuit, but it is not the pursuit.

Structure is a tempting explanation, and a weaker one than it looks. Span of control describes a relationship between how wide a manager’s span is and how many layers there are, which is a matter of the shape of the structure. The pursuit is tied to vague criteria rather than to the number of layers: a structure of two layers with vague criteria produces more of it than one of five layers with written criteria. Empowerment, finally, is not its opposite. Empowerment rests on declared authority within stated limits, and that written limit is exactly what narrows the room here, since a written limit removes the need to influence whoever decides. Empowerment declared without limits widens it, because the area of decision has grown and no criterion has been written for it.

Related terms

• Informal Communication
• Peter Principle
• Employee Onboarding
• Corporate Whistleblowing
• Performance Standards