WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS?

By Joe Newsum

Organizational politics disgusts me. I have watched it ruin too many companies. The wrong people constantly promoted. Great people driven out the door. Power dynamics squashing novel strategies to protect the status quo. Loud voices and emotion winning over logic and facts. Some of the best strategies I ever built were killed by politics, and not because they were wrong. They threatened someone’s turf. It was defeating. My own energy left those companies, and eventually, so did I.

And here is the thing about how it spreads. Nobody sets out to build a political company, and almost nobody gets fired for playing politics. Politics is a disease, and it metastasizes fast for one simple reason: self-promotion and self-preservation get rewarded, and people are logical. When the operators keep winning, everyone watching learns the lesson. Meanwhile the principled people, the ones who know it is not right, get cynical and unmotivated, and they leave for greener pastures. The disease spreads by rewarding its carriers and exiling its immune system. And it is predictable. You will find politics in every company where the five ambiguities run high: nobody is sure what winning means, who owns what, what gets rewarded, who decides, or what is really going on. Every single time.

I have always said that politics is a misalignment of goals. When what is good for a person and what is good for the company point in different directions, people go to work on their own goals in private, and that private work is politics. Put precisely:

Read the definition again and notice what is missing: scheming, backstabbing, bad people. Politics here is simply a decision with the wrong beneficiary. Organizational politics goes by many names, including office politics and workplace politics, and it is the same phenomenon at every scale, from a three-person team to a Fortune 500 enterprise. That framing matters because it makes politics observable. You cannot audit intentions, but you can audit decisions, and every decision in your company either serves the strategy or serves someone’s corner of it.

Seventy percent of your managers believe playing politics is a requirement of the job. They did not arrive at that belief cynically. They watched how outcomes get decided in your company and drew the rational conclusion. Understanding politics means understanding the drives underneath it, the environment that turns those drives toxic, and the currencies the game gets played in.

WHY POLITICS EMERGES

Politics starts with two drives older than any company. For most of human history we lived in small bands where status decided your share of food, protection, allies, and a future, and where falling out of the group’s favor could be fatal. Getting ahead and not falling behind were survival strategies long before they were career strategies. The research confirms what the savanna built: the desire for status is a fundamental human motive, universal across cultures, ages, and personalities. And the preservation half runs even deeper, because losses loom larger than gains in human psychology, which is why the fear of falling behind is the stronger and quieter of the two forces.

Here is the part almost everyone gets wrong: these drives are good. Power and preservation are the engine of every high performer on the payroll. You hired for ambition. The hunger to rise and the refusal to lose are what push people through hard quarters, big bets, and impossible deadlines. A company that could somehow remove power and preservation from its people would not get a politics-free culture. It would get a passive one. The goal is to tap the fuel, and every great company does.

Power is the visible drive. It looks like credit-taking, visibility-chasing, and scope-grabbing, and people will admit to it, because ambition is socially acceptable. Preservation is the invisible one, and the more corrosive one. It looks like hoarded information, defended headcount, blame moved sideways, and good initiatives quietly killed because they threaten someone’s turf. Nobody ever admits to fear. Which means the more damaging half of politics is also the half no one in your company will ever tell you about.

So the drives walk in the door with every hire, good and ready to work, and the environment and culture decide where they go. The environment is the structure: the goals, decision rights, accountabilities, and rewards. The culture is how people actually behave inside that structure every day. Together they set the payoff table, and the payoff table routes the fuel. When getting ahead requires delivering for the company, power and preservation power performance. But within an environment of ambiguity and no true meritocracy, the same drives get incentivized to focus on the self, and they turn toxic, expressing themselves as bad decisions and politics that enrich and protect the self and the team. Nobody plans it and nobody chooses it in a meeting. It emerges, one rational read of the payoff table at a time.

THE FIVE AMBIGUITIES

Politics thrives on two conditions, and the first is ambiguity. Misaligned goals in a fully transparent company produce open conflict. Loud arguments, real debate, honest fights over direction. Uncomfortable, often healthy, and nobody calls it politics. Politics is the covert version, and covert operations need somewhere to hide. Ambiguity is the hiding place, and it comes in five forms, each of which incentivizes self-focus in its own way.

1. Goal ambiguity. When nobody knows what winning means, people define winning as their own advancement. Ask five executives what winning looks like this year and you get five different answers. Priorities reshuffle every quarter, projects live or die on whose project it is rather than what it does for the strategy, and people manage their careers because the company never told them what else to manage toward.

2. Ownership ambiguity. Unclaimed territory invites land grabs. Every new opportunity triggers a land rush, two teams quietly build the same thing, and anything important gets escalated because nobody can say whose call it is. The org discovers its real map only during reorgs, when everyone fights hardest for the disputed territories.

3. Reward ambiguity. When nobody knows what gets rewarded, people optimize for visibility instead of contribution. Promotions arrive that nobody can explain, and everyone tries to. Polished decks beat working products, being in the room matters more than being right, and people manage up relentlessly, because managing up is the only criterion anyone can actually verify.

4. Decision ambiguity. When nobody knows who decides, lobbying works. The meeting before the meeting becomes the real meeting. Decisions get made in the room, then unmade in a hallway. Everything requires consensus, so nothing carries anyone’s signature, and the real decision goes to whoever catches the decision maker last.

5. Information ambiguity. When nobody knows what is really going on, narrative management pays. Rumor outruns every official channel, status updates get spun before they travel upward, and the numbers arrive pre-narrated. Information gets traded like currency, because in an ambiguous company, it is one.

Every one of these is an open invitation for power and preservation to go to work on their own behalf. And ambiguity does two deeper things beyond providing cover. First, it severs contribution from reward. Even a leadership team that genuinely wants to reward merit cannot do it in fog, because when nobody can say what good looks like, impressions replace evidence by default. Second, and most underrated, ambiguity activates preservation. Uncertainty reads as threat to the human nervous system, so people in fog assume the worst and start protecting themselves. Ambiguity does not just give politics somewhere to hide. It manufactures the fear that fuels it, which is why reorgs, leadership transitions, and vague strategy periods produce politics spikes even in otherwise healthy companies. The research on this reads like a controlled experiment.

That finding kills the last excuse. Your people are not political in the clear parts of your company and virtuous in the ambiguous parts by coincidence. They are reading the terrain. And one more thing about clarity: it does not propagate on its own. A company can have a genuinely clear strategy at the top and be a snake pit three levels down, because clarity degrades at every handoff. It has to be rebuilt at the company level, the functional level, and the team level, or the fog wins by default.

NO TRUE MERITOCRACY

The second condition is the absence of a true meritocracy. In a real meritocracy, politics is a bad investment. You can lobby and posture all you want, but if contribution decides outcomes, the effort is wasted, and rational people stop wasting it. In a company where merit does not decide, politics is the only rational investment left. Same people, different payoff table.

The trap is that every company believes it is a meritocracy, and the belief itself is dangerous. Research on the paradox of meritocracy shows that organizations which explicitly declare themselves meritocratic show more bias in rewards and promotions, because leaders who believe they are impartial stop checking themselves. A meritocracy is a claim to be tested, never assumed. The test is simple and uncomfortable: walk your last ten promotions and say out loud why each one actually happened. Your people already know the answers. They watched, and then they repriced their behavior based on what they saw. I have watched a single promotion teach an entire company the real rules.

There is a subtler failure too. Plenty of decent companies reward merit, but only the merit they can see. Past a certain size, most work happens out of leadership’s sight, so reputation stands in for evidence, and reputation can be managed in a way evidence cannot. That is why politics scales with headcount even in honest companies. The standard is whether you can see merit, and past a few hundred people, seeing it takes a system.

All of it leads to an uncomfortable conclusion, and I will say it plainly: politics is management’s fault. The five ambiguities are management’s to clarify, and clarifying them is hard, grinding, unglamorous work. Answering those five questions once is a planning exercise. Answering them at every level and every handoff, and keeping the answers current, is the actual job of leadership, and most leadership teams have never done it. They wrote the strategy deck and assumed the fog would clear on its own.

And politics is at its worst exactly where it is hardest to see: at the top. Left unchecked, the executive team becomes a ring of yes men and yes women, reinforcing the CEO, reinforcing the power dynamics, and shielding the CEO from what is really happening in the company. The information currency gets played hardest in the rooms closest to power, which means the person with the most authority to fix the politics is often the last person to know it exists. I have watched CEOs discover, years too late, that everything they thought they knew about their company had been curated. If your executive team never disagrees with you, that is not alignment. That is the disease at stage four.

HOW POLITICS SHOWS UP: THE FIVE CURRENCIES

Once the drives turn inward, they need something to play for. Every company decision is an allocation. Money, people, authority, credit, and attention all flow somewhere when a decision gets made. A political decision routes those flows toward self or silo instead of toward the strategy. Watch closely and you will see the game is always played in one of five currencies, and each has an offense mode and a defense mode, the fingerprints of power and preservation.

Authority. On offense: grabbing scope, headcount, reporting lines, and a seat in every decision. On defense: vetoing the reorg and blocking anything that touches the turf. The empire builder measures success in territory, and resources flow to position rather than contribution.

Resources. On offense: chasing budget, the best people, executive attention, and the flagship project. On defense: hoarding budget that is not needed, sitting on talent so no one can poach it, and sandbagging targets so next year is easy. Budget season is the annual championship of this currency.

Credit. On offense: attaching to wins, presenting other people’s work, and managing visibility. On defense: distancing from losses and making sure blame lands elsewhere. Watch how credit and blame move through your company. Political operators collect the first and shed the second. Great leaders do the exact opposite.

Position. On offense: chasing the title, the comp, and the succession slot. On defense: becoming unfireable, often by becoming the only person who understands something critical. The defense mode is quieter and far more expensive, because it rewards complexity and punishes transparency. Titles and scope become identity, which is why people defend them far past the point of rational self-interest.

Information. On offense: framing the narrative before the meeting happens. On defense: withholding as insurance and keeping the pre-meeting circle small. Politics needs darkness, and information is both its weapon and its shield.

Notice that the currencies themselves are not the problem. Authority, resources, credit, and position are exactly what a company should allocate, and ambitious people should want them. The politics is in the routing: acquiring them through maneuvering instead of earning them through contribution. And political decisions have a tell. They always wear the company costume. Nobody says they are protecting their headcount. They say the project is critical to customers. The decision serves the silo and gets justified with the strategy, and the vaguer your strategy is, the better the costume fits.

Two boundaries keep this definition honest. First, a misaligned decision made in good faith, because the strategy was never made clear, is confusion rather than politics. Second, influence itself is neutral. Building a coalition to advance the strategy is leadership. Building one to advance yourself is politics. Same skills, different beneficiary.

THE COST: MASSIVE VALUE DESTRUCTION AND A TOXIC CULTURE

Let me make the cost concrete. Years ago I was a strategy consultant at Sports Authority, working for my third CEO of the engagement. The first was fired. The second fired me. The third hired me back to bring new ideas, because the company was declining three percent a year, needed to comp three percent a year, and I had told leadership it was a year from bankruptcy. We built a turnaround strategy on behavioral economics: focus on big ticket hardlines, bikes, skis, golf clubs, tennis racquets, and give families, the ideal customer, an amazing invitation to come back and shop. Free service and flat tire fixes with every bike. Twenty-five percent off accessories for a year with a bike or a set of clubs. Buy more, save more, with the second family bike at ten percent off, the third at fifteen, the fourth at twenty. A cross-functional team built the fast path to implement it through the loyalty program, and the bike test was enormously successful.

Then the politics went to work. The COO announced in a meeting that he could not have his store associates doing all of these initiatives, the politicking behind the scenes finished the job, and the strategy died with a winning test in its hands. Sports Authority went bankrupt a year later, as predicted. I believe it would still be here if the company had committed. Politics did not just kill a strategy. It killed the company.

Politics is your company competing with itself. Every hour spent winning inside the building is an hour not focused on pushing the company forward. The value destruction runs through two channels, and they both empty into the same drain.

The first channel is the wrong decisions. When politics decides instead of merit, the budget goes to the best lobbyist rather than the best opportunity, the promotion goes to the most visible rather than the most valuable, and the strategy gets bent around whoever fought hardest in the room. Loud voices and emotion win over logic and facts, and novel strategies get squashed to protect the status quo. Each of those decisions compounds. A year of them is a strategy half-executed and a portfolio of bets that were never placed.

The second channel is your best people leaving. A players have options, and they will not stay where merit does not decide. And it is rarely a dramatic exit. The principled people, the ones who know it is not right, get cynical first, then unmotivated, then gone to greener pastures. The people politics drives out first are precisely the ones you can least afford to lose, and the people it retains are the ones who have learned to win at it. Over time the org quietly selects for political skill over contribution, which accelerates everything else on this page. I have lived this one from the inside. Watching politics kill work you believed in drains your energy long before it changes your address, and eventually it changes your address too.

Both channels empty into the real cost: massive opportunity cost. All that energy, aimed inward. The pre-meetings, the coalition building, the narrative management, the defensive documentation, the talent spent decoding the real rules instead of doing the work. None of it shows up as a line item, which is why politics survives budget reviews that would kill any other expense this large.

And the bill is not only financial. Politics creates a toxic culture, and it does it fast. Trust collapses first, because people learn that what gets said in the room is not what gets done in the hallway. Candor goes underground next, because truth-telling becomes dangerous. Then fear spreads, cynicism becomes the house style, and the everyday experience of work turns from building something together into surviving each other. The research is blunt about where that ends.

Think about the last political move you watched succeed in your company. What made it work? What was unclear enough to hide it, and what payoff made it worth the risk? Now the harder question: who else watched it succeed, and what did they learn?

There is a way out, and it does not involve hunting for bad actors. Politics is a design output, which means it can be designed out, by rebuilding the environment and the culture until serving yourself once again requires serving the company. That redesign deserves its own playbook, and it has one: How to Reduce Office Politics. It is also the work I do with CEOs and executive teams every day.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is organizational politics?

Organizational politics is people at any level making decisions that serve themselves or their team instead of the company and its strategy. It is driven by the universal pull of power and preservation, played out in five currencies of authority, resources, credit, position, and information, and it thrives wherever goals are ambiguous and merit does not decide outcomes.

What causes politics in a company?

Three things together: a motive, an opportunity, and a payoff. The motive is permanent, because everyone wants to get ahead and no one wants to fall behind. The opportunity is ambiguity, meaning unclear goals, criteria, and decision rights that give political behavior somewhere to hide. The payoff is a broken meritocracy, where lobbying and visibility management actually work. Remove the opportunity or the payoff and politics starves, because the motive alone produces nothing.

Is organizational politics always bad?

The underlying drives are neutral and even valuable, since ambition and self-protection fuel every high performer. Influence skills are neutral too. What makes something politics is the beneficiary: a coalition built to advance the strategy is leadership, while the same coalition built to advance a person or a silo is politics. The damage comes from the routing, because energy spent winning internally never reaches the market.

How do you reduce politics in an organization?

You change the environment and the culture rather than hunting for bad actors. That means aligning goals to one cascaded strategy, killing the ambiguity with clear decision rights and criteria, holding people to clear accountabilities in the open, and letting merit visibly decide promotions and rewards. Firing political people does not work on its own, because the environment that produced them is still there.

Why do political people keep getting promoted?

Because in most companies, visibility substitutes for evidence. Past a certain size leaders cannot see most of the work firsthand, so reputation stands in for contribution, and reputation can be managed in a way contribution cannot. Political operators are experts at exactly that management. The fix is making contribution visible through open accountability, so the promotion decision has evidence to run on instead of impressions.

How do leaders unintentionally create politics?

By publishing a price list without realizing it. If decisions get reversed in hallway conversations, if the last voice in the room wins, if there are visible favorites, or if one promotion goes to a campaigner over a contributor, the organization reads those signals and reprices its behavior immediately. People do not follow the values statement. They follow the promotion list, the budget outcomes, and what the leader tolerates, because those are the real rules.