Stephen Billing’s Blog

A summary of conventional thinking about politics in organisations… the jury rules that organisational politics is guilty of diverting resources and energy from the real work

I am sure that all of us have felt at times in our careers that we have been on the losing end of a political situation. In one project I worked on I didn’t realise the close relationship between the manager and another key team member and ended up being excluded from interesting and useful work. Sometimes it seems that certain people are developing exclusive relationships, or we are not included in the decision making, or you agree one thing and then suddenly another option is on the table.

"Organisational politics is often equated with the devious, the underhand, the cunning, and the manipulative,” say Buchanan and Badham, 1999 in "Politics and Organizational Change: The Lived Experience" in the journal Human Relations (subscription required).

According to Mayes and Allen in their 1977 article entitled Toward A Definition of Organizational Politics, in the Academy of Management Review, (no link, subscription required) political behaviour is based on using influence without organisational sanction for either the means used or the ends being pursued.

Drory and Romm in The Definition Of Organizational Politics: A Review, published in Human Relations, 1990, (again subscription required) suggest that organisational politics occurs when people seek to achieve goals by informal means in the face of conflict. These self serving goals work against the organisational purposes, using covert non-job-related means to achieve concealed motives in situations characterised by conflict and uncertainty. Many change situations seem to involve conflict, or at least tension between different points of view.

In a very interesting study, Eisenhardt and Bourgeois in their 1988 Academy of Management Journal article "The Politics Of Strategic Decision Making In High-Velocity Environments: Toward A Midrange Theory," define politics as “the observable, but often covert, actions by which executives enhance their power to influence a decision”.

They identify political behaviours as being:

behind-the-scenes coalition formation, offline lobbying and cooptation attempts, withholding information, and controlling agendas… Politics contrast with the straightforward influence tactics of open and forthright discussion, with full sharing of information, in settings open to all decision makers (p738).

Their study found that these political actions are actually a feature of conflictual situations where power is centralised around a dominating chief executive rather than being associated with decentralised power. They argue that the greater the centralisation of power in an organisation, the greater the use of politics within a top management team. They also found that politics were not fluid, but became entrenched in stable alliances which were often based on characteristics such as office location or age. They concluded that politics were associated with poor organisation performance because they restrict the flow of information and are time-consuming.

All of this illustrates the poor regard in which the concept of politics is held. Do you agree?

In one way, all of this seems pretty common sense, and I think we take it for granted that politics is bad and has negative impact on real results. You don’t have to look very far to find advice that "you should not get involved in the politics," whether you are senior manager, middle manager, team leader, front line worker, technician, consultant, contractor or general dogsbody.

As you can probably guess, I want to challenge this dominant thinking about politics.

Watch for a post on this soon…

Footnote: The image depicts the Beehive, which is the building that houses the offices of the Prime Minister, cabinet and Ministers – it is an iconic building in New Zealand politics. For the US the equivalent icon would be the White House, for the UK it would be the Houses of Parliament.