I am Autistic and a paper that I am working on involves a “political mindset” to solve a problem. I am seeing ways to survive office politics but I am not sure ultimately what it is. Please help.
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If the Employee Handbook says how decisions are “supposed to” be made,
office politics determines how they are actually made, often involving social manipulation and strategy. In other words, office politics refers to the power structure at a workplace, and the systems used to manipulate them. This includes both on-paper structures (management, HR) as well as human relationships (friendships, significant others, family, workplace enemies).
So, a project manager might be ordered to assign bonuses based on how much everyone contributed to the project. But, if the higher-ups didn’t say exactly how the project manager is supposed to measure contribution, and the project manager is at least somewhat careful about who they pick, it’s pretty hard to prove whether the project manager distributed the bonuses properly or not.
For another example, a project manager might be assigned to promote an employee to another department based on who is “best suited to the new job”. If they have to choose between two employees to promote, they’ll often choose someone whoever makes their live the easiest.
This might mean promoting a trusted friend to gain influence in the other department, or promoting someone they dislike in order to stop dealing with them. This kind of trickery is office politics.
Office politics isn’t reserved for management, however. Employees can participate as well – for instance, by waiting until pay raise season before “finishing” a long-running job that was actually done weeks or months ago, or going out of the way to be nice to people who might become their managers in the future. Heck, office politics can be as simple as “looking busy” when your work is done, in order to avoid more work. Or it might mean choosing work that is easy to show off, rather than work that is important. Or annoying a coworker so they help you first. Or picking assignments based on who is around at the time.
Of course, this doesn’t affect everyone at every company. Some people do their jobs honestly, and some companies make it genuinely impractical to try to game the system. But people who understand the power structures at their office, and know how to manipulate them, have an advantage.
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