Is Company Politics Strangling Your Business, and You With It?

Abstract

The term ‘company politics’ refers to all the game-playing, snide, ‘them and us’, aggressive, sabotaging, negative, blaming, ‘win-lose’, withholding, non-cooperative behaviour that goes on in hundreds of interactions everyday in your organisation. Those who indulge in company politics do so in order to achieve their personal agenda at the expense of others in the organisation. In the process, they demoralise the motivated and sabotage the company’s success. Given their limited numbers, like one or two bad apples souring the whole barrel, they are disproportionately powerful.

‘The hardest battle is to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.’

(e.e. cummings)