397. The psychology of office politics

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here, back for another episode as we, of course break down the psychology of our twenties. Here is a story I hear a lot from listeners of the show. It is the story of someone being fresh out of college, fresh out of UNI, getting their first job, starting a new job, being super optimistic and excited, and they're excited for the security and for the paycheck and for the beginning of something new. And then a few months in they encounter to someone who just like wants to make their life miserable, whether that is a colleague, whether that is a boss, or they realize like, hey, like, wait a second, this workplace literally feels like I'm back in high school. Why does this person have an issue with me? Why are these people sleeping together? Why did I not get that promotion when I obviously work harder? Why does this person just hate me? I hear a story about this, probably every week, a story about office politics, about drama and backstabbing and affairs and stuff that honestly nobody prepares us for in the workplace. We spend so much time at work, and office politics and situations like this do not get enough credit for how stressful they can be because we're often Part of the stress is we have zero idea what to do, especially in our twenties. We feel so helpless, our work begins to suffer, we feel pessimistic about work in general. But how you go about managing these situations is going to shape your career deeply and possibly for the better. And if you have the right tools, your approach to office politics could actually make you more successful. Today, I want to give you a bit of that guide into the psychology that drives these hidden social mechanisms in the workplace and kind of the reminder that we need that all of this is just complex human behavior boiled down into petty drama. Behind the scenes of all of this is secret motivations, emotions, human psychology that is influencing why people are the way we are or the way they are. And when we understand that psychology, we understand that research and that science. We have a better emotional playbook for dealing with this and for rising above some of like the terrible frustrating things that workplace politics is going to throw at us. So this is what we're discussing today. It's going to be a big episode, but a very worthwhile essential one if you are just beginning your career or in your twenties. Without further ado, let's get into it. A lot of the time, I think our early twenties and our twenties in general, is like the first time we're really exposed to like very interesting and secretive workplace dynamics. I don't remember ever thinking about this before I started working. Yes, university, maybe high school had these like subtle hierarchies, same as like some of our early jobs. But only as you get older do you realize how strange and like manipulative people can be, and like the unwritten rules that are at play in the workplace that is the office politics we're talking about. There is a literal whole, and I mean major major discipline of psychology devoted to this very thing. By the way, it's called organizational psychology. It essentially exclusively focuses on why people behave the way they do it work. Because we know work is such a huge part of our human lives and human identity, it makes sense that it is as complicated as relationships, as complicated as marriages, as family. So back to the office. If you want to understand the complexities of office politics, you first have to understand that every office has, or every workplace has two structures, the formal hierarchy and the informal network. So on paper, the hierarchy is very clear. You know you have managers, directors, executives, interns, etc. Etc. This is like bureaucratic authority, right. The people at the top have legitimate rule based power over people at the bottom. You know, who has the title, who does the budgets, who does the performance reviews, who is in charge. Alongside this, though, is another structure that is more influential. This is the informal network. So these are the relationships. These are the relationship that determine who gets consulted, who actually shapes the decisions, who is actually trusted with sensitive information, and then also who makes more money, who gets the promotions. Even if that power structure doesn't line up with the formal power structure, this is sometimes what they call the shadow organization. It's like these unspoken channels of influence that you have to be aware of if you want to play the game of work. There is this classic theory from the fifties about the five main sources of workplace power. And this is the other thing you have to be aware of if you want to navigate the complexities of office life. If you want to have influence at work, you can have one of these five forms of power. Legitimate power, so the kind of power that is granted by authority, reward power, power in your ability to provide benefits, praise, recognition, coercive power, the power to punish, expert power, the power of knowledge and competence, and finally, reverent power, the ability to influence things through charisma and through likability. In your twenties, like, you likely don't have much legitimate power yet. And I mean, if you do, that's amazing, Like that's really cool if you are the CEO or something. But most people in their twenties don't decide how much people get paid. You can't really fire or hire on mass. What you do have, though, is referent and expert power. You can become indispensable by developing the knowledge and the skills that other people don't have time for and they need to rely on you to do. You can also build alliances, you can collaborate with people, You can be nice to people. If you've ever heard the term personality higher, this is what we're talking about. People always dismiss the personality higher, but all that means is that you have great soft skills. You are enjoyable to be around. You a booster, You are a fresh perspective. That is a huge asset in your twenties when a lot of people are very jaded. You have something others don't. You have to use whatever you can, including that to your advantage. You being a nice person to be around helps your boss. It strokes their ego, It makes them feel good, which, yeah, may not be able to outperform somebody who is making three times as much as you may not be able to outperform a very complex skill. But that small addition, on top of the other things you're doing and the other skills you do have, gives you great power. You give something. You are giving your personality. They are getting something in return from that. One of the most useful psychological frameworks for office politics is basically exactly this. It's called social exchange theory. It was first proposed by George Homans like in the fifties. I think it was further developed in the sixties. You'll hear social exchange theory talked about in everything from relationships to work to our pets. But it essentially suggests that all human relationships, all relationships in general, operate on a principle of exchange. We give and we receive resources, whether that is material resources like money, emotional resources like love and respect. Relationships thrive when the exchange is balanced, and they suffer when they feel one sided. In an office, this shows up constantly. This exchange theory is literally the basis of all office politics. You help a coworker meet a deadline, they later advocate for you during like promotion time. You share credit, others share credit with you. You make your boss feel hip and young and cool and fun. They're going to be a nice boss back to you. You're going to get stuff in return. The social exchange theory is balanced. The exchange theory is balanced basically on the flip side. It also explains why the energy of an office can become really toxic if you feel like, and I think this is an experience a lot of us have when we're younger. If you feel like you are endlessly giving everything, your loyalty, your ideas, your evenings, and you are not receiving any recognition, any support, any money, that is a surefire way for resentment to build, just like you would get super frustrated at a friend or a romantic partner for never reciprocating plans, never reciprocating the effort you put into their birthday, Like, this is all happening at work equally, except now it's with your co workers and you arguably probably see them a lot more. And you also can't just end the relationship and walk away the way that you probably could do with a bad friend, like they are there as much as you are. So this is why we cannot brush over this stuff psychologically. The workplace, like it isn't just a place we show up and we do a bit of work and we get a paycheck and we go home and it's all great. It is a stage where we perform parts of ourselves and parts of our identity, and it is a stage where we are performing a social dance and we are seeking belonging, Like we do in any social environment. When you are rejected, when you are excluded, when you do not feel part of the social fabric of the office, or you do not feel like people are friendly to you or kind to you, this will genuinely erode your mental health. Belonging is one of our most essential emotional and psychological needs, whether it is at home, in a relationship out in the world. If you do not feel like you belong, you kind of collapse inwards. Studies in organizational psychology have shown us time and time again employees that perceive themselves to be outsiders, people who feel like they are being pushed out of the inner circle of work, they are going to experience much higher levels of anxiety, lower job performance, greater repeated intentions to quit. They also have poor self worth because like it or not, so much about our identity is tied up in our professional lives and is tied up in our professional career. You cannot avoid it. Whatever relationship you have with your work, it's just the mere fact that you're spending so much time there. It's going to mean you and your job and your career will quickly become quite enmeshed, and you and your co workers, and the relationship you have with them will quickly impact your mental health if it goes wrong. And the other thing about exclusion, because I think this is a big part of office politics that happens a lot to us in our twenties, but at any age, Like, the big thing about exclusion is that it actually consumes a lot of mental resources to be left out, Like it consumes a lot of mental resources to constantly be hypervigilant towards who's in the kitchen, who isn't talking to me, who doesn't like me. It takes a lot of time away from our actual job, our actual tasks. That means that we perform poorer, which means we get more criticism, which means we feel more excluded, which means that it is just becomes this cycle of performance linked to exclusion that then creates poorer performance and worse exclusion. This is why office politics matters so much. It's not just about promotions and recognition. There is this hidden world of inclusion and status and validation and the way those things are distributed that is going to directly impact your psychology as an employee and as a person outside of work. Okay, we're going to take a short break here because that's a lot of stuff all at once. But when I return, let's talk about competition. Let's talk about gossip, and let's talk about how you can use workplace competitiveness to your advantage. So stay with us. Competition in the workplace, I think is like the second worst thing about office politics, after exclusion and after obviously like workplace bullying and harassment. But competition is like, is fierce. It can ruin us emotionally to feel like we are constantly on this hamster wheel of trying to be better than the next person or the person behind us, in front of us, beside us. I remember when I I've had I don't know what it is, but every actually I've never had a workplace was not competitive, even when I worked at the steak restaurant. When I worked at the steak restaurant in Uni, I had this terrible boss where I talk about a lot because I hated this man and he was awful to us, and he had this hierarchy right of the employees that he liked and the employees that he didn't. And there were two employees that he always really liked, and then there were like fifteen of us who were vying for like three other positions in that like top five slot, and it whether you were on the inn or the out with him would like determine if you got to leave early, how many tips you got, like what sections you worked in, And that environment created so much competition and like genuine like sabotage at like the steak restaurant. Like I used to find it so funny that all these politicians and academics and like very wealthy people would be eating their i don't know, medium rare steaks, and behind the scenes there was like all these like eighteen to twenty seven year olds who had like major workplace grief with each other or because of this environment that this man created, all because of this competition. And then that happened again in like my corporate job, and in the corporate environment that I worked in, there is this idea like there was always not enough to go around. There was so much competition about who was staying the latest, who was putting in the craziest hours. It was like this badge of honor to have poor work life boundaries, especially in your twenties, when again we talk about the power that we have in our twenties, a lot of the power that we have is that we can do the brunt work. That's how we get ahead is by doing the things nobody else wants to do. Back to this competition thing, why why why do workplaces get so competitive? It's because they are often structured around scarce resources. This is really what it comes down to. It is a resource problem. Bonuses promotions, who likes who, There's not enough to go around. There's not enough love, admiration, money, corner offices so that everybody can get one. This can very easily turn colleagues into rivals. It is like a tailor's old as time. We know in psychology that the scarcity effect makes and turns us into irrational creatures. When something seems more rare or less available, this changes how we react to that thing, and it means that we often do things we wouldn't because something seems exclusive or rare, and therefore we want it more. Competition is always going to exist in the workplace, especially if you're in a very corporate competitive job market, but psychology tells us that how we interpret competition is going to change its emotional and vocational impact on us. Competition can be informational or emotional. We want it to be informational. That is what we're aspiring to because when it is framed in this way, when it is framed as something that is helping us to understand where we stand, helping us notice our weaknesses, helping us push ourselves further, it can actually motivate growth. When it is framed as emotional or threatening, A scarce game like the one we're in means that somebody else's success is always going to mean our failure, and that's going to trigger envy, to trigger defensiveness. More crucially, though, it's going to trigger more rash behavior that's actually going to make you look worse and make you or turn you into somebody who is antisocial, who could even do bad things. Social psychologists really like to get into the nitty gritty of the distinction here, and they like to distinguish between benign envy, which motivates self improvement, and malicious envy, which actually just motivates tearing others down and in the process, we should say destroying us more destroying us because it makes us look bad, destroying us because it takes all of our concentration and energy we should be putting towards our goals and our work, and it turns it towards somebody else. I truly believe competition and envy are some of the most powerful states of mind that you can find yourself in because they actually they deeply reveal what we want in life. It's probably one of the easiest ways is to know what you desire. Who are you jealous of? Who do you really envy? Because if there wasn't something about them you secretly actually admired and wanted or secretly found impressive, you wouldn't be jealous of it because it wouldn't be something that you secretly wanted and aspired towards. This knowledge can actually bolster your performance. There was a two thousand and eight study I don't know what university it was done at, maybe Brown, and it found that exposure to high achieving peers boosted performance when when the other participants saw their success as inspiring rather than threatening. So when they saw somebody doing really well and they were like, Wow, that's incredible, I really want to be like them. It didn't eliminate competition. It made competition a game. It made it something fun, It made it a motivational resource that they could use to their advantage. It became like a superpower, even if, like even if the other people around you don't feel the same, Like, even if you are the only one who wants to treat competition this way in your workplace amongst your peers. It is not like a I guess not as zeros some game, like not everybody has to play for the game to still go your way. You will still come out exponentially better if you can do the mindset and the psychological and the emotional work to turn competition from emotional into informational. Listen, I kind of get it, Like, you can have that mindset, and there's always going to be somebody who doesn't, and there's always going to be somebody who is going to take it too far. I think few dynamics feel worse than realizing a colleague is actively trying to make you look bad, whether it is withholding information, subtle digs, questioning your competence in front of other people, gossiping about you. Psychologists have a name for this, it's called social undermining. It is deliberate behaviors that chip away at somebody's reputation and even at their own ability to get work done or to get things done. The hypervigilance this creates is its own level of exhaustion. You are basically going to work on the defense eight hours a day, five days a week more. For some that is going to change your stress response, change your emotional response, change how you react in work and outside of work. I don't want to discount that in the slightest. If you're going through something like this at the moment where a boss hates you, a colleague hates you, somebody is undermining you, somebody obviously doesn't want you to succeed and is setting you up for failure. It is very easy to maybe dismiss that and think, oh, it's just work, it doesn't really matter, like I'll get through it. But it is probably deeply impacting you. So I want you to know I have a lot of empathy for that, lot of sympathy for the situation you're in. There are some things you can do, though, that are going to make this situation not better, but more preferable for you. This is what I think you can do if you are in that hyper competitive maybe saboteur situation. Firstly, information tracking, note taking, archiving is your best friend. Right now dates what was said what was done. Any witnesses. This might feel pretty bureaucratic and maybe petty at first, but if this person genuinely doesn't like you, when it reaches the point where their behavior is really injuring your reputation or it becomes workplace bullying, this just gives you some leverage. It gives you something that you can escalate to hr and be like, hey, I am not crazy. This is what has been done. When it comes to that's a long term strategy. When it comes to responding in the moment, the hardest part is that you have to stay strategic than reactive. Half the time, a reaction is what people want, even if it's not, it will help them. You having an immediate, angry, furious, loud reaction is going to do them favors. It's so unfair because all you want to do is stand up for yourself. But you have to try and stick to facts, not feelings. Keep it really simple responses like I noticed X happened in the meeting. Can you explain that to me? I noticed that you said this. I don't understand why that's funny. I noticed that you didn't send me that. Was there a reason The use of questions against a bully or against somebody who is competitive is the most important thing you can do, because it shifts the need to explain and justify back onto them, and it will very quickly show like the gaps in their story or the moments that don't add up to people outside of the situation. That's not to say your emotions are not important. They act as a compass. They validate your experience, they point out what's not okay. But giving someone direct access to those emotions right now is giving them a bit of a strategic advantage because they now know what hurts you most where they can deliver blows to make sure that you hurt, wear things sting how to get what they want from you. Try and keep them private from the person who is frustrating you. I don't know, I was going to say interrogating you, but from the person who is obviously trying to make your life a bit more miserable. Here's a final major tip that I know from experience can be so hard to avoid, but really try not to mirror their behavior. Retaliation feels so satisfying biologically emotionally, but it entrenches the toxicity and it really can cause damage to your reputation. By staying professional, staying composed, you gain power. You become the person others see is reliable, others see is steady and competent, the one who rises above the drama over time, that credibility is your biggest asset because it acts as armor. And those colleagues, that boss, that manager who's trying to undermine you, loses their influence against that steadiness. Let's talk about one final aspect of workplace office politics that I'm just realizing we haven't touched on it all, which is bizarre because it's so so vital. I'm going to give you, guys, like two seconds to guess. We're going to talk about gossip. This is the question we all want to know the answer to Should you gossip at work? Simple question, strangely complicated answer. Gossip is complicated because it is social currency. It is the social currency of the workplace. When you have information nobody else knows, that is a commodity, That is a commodity to trade. It's a way to socially bond as well, whether we like to admit it or not. Like people who gossip do have more and sometimes, let's be real, they are more fun, but frequent, exclusively negative gossip will carry real costs, and it's something that, especially if you're in your twenties, you need to avoid. Despite like the allure of like the immediate benefit of dopamine. Like gossip brings dopamine, it brings oxytocin, it's bonding. A twenty twenty four study, though from researchers at the I Think University of Leeds in the UK, they actually found that it will often make you look worse. They conducted a series of studies with like fourteen hundred participants. They basically presented them with a hypothetical workplace scenario with colleagues with gossipers with not people who don't gossip, and what they found was that whilst the participants viewed the people who gossiped as more sociable, they often actually liked them more, they also viewed them as less moral, less competent, and they were less likely to trust them or provide them with promotions. In other words, gossip is like it's going to give you the short term hit. It might grant you short term inclusion, but it costs you credibility in the long run. It's a piece of advice. My Mum always used to give me. The worst person in the office is not the person that makes mistakes, It is the person who talks about them. So resist the urge even when something feels juicy. I always like to assume, like the person is in the next room. The person can always overhear you, and I don't know what do they say about reputation, like it takes takes five minutes to build a reputation that will last a lifetime. And if you want a gossip, if you don't want to be excluded from like the water Fountain chat. Research published in twenty twenty two highlights that actually engaging in positive workplace gossip, talking good behind somebody's back a semi polar sets that can actually make you more value well, we can bolster social standing. It increases the rate and timing of promotions, the study found, and it makes you feel better at work. It's like nicotine replacement therapy for gossip, or like junk food replacement therapy, like swap chocolate with dark chocolate, swap cruel gossip with positive gossip. Before we wrap up on our office politics episode, I want to share some final advice for managing these situations that I wish I'd known sooner. I was really reflecting on this when writing this episode because our four hundredth episode, my three Anniverse recents quitting my job, is coming up, and now that I've had some distance from like corporate life, I think there are some objective insights that I can share about my situation that hopefully you guys can take advantage of. So stay with us. We're going to talk about all of that and more after this short break. Like I said, it has been three years since I quit my corporate job to do well. Actually not three it's been like two and a half since I quit my corporate job to do the podcast full time. And I feel like in the kind of months and years after I quit that job, I always thought I was gonna have to go back, and I always thought that I was, Yeah, I was gonna have to ask for my job back. So I never used to talk about work or like that job really on the podcast. But today I thought i'd do it, and I thought i'd kind of share some of the things that I'd learned and that I wish i'd done differently, the biggest one being I wish and I tell everybody this, this has nothing to do with office politics, just to do with being in an office. Use your sick leave. If you have paid sick leave, I need you to be taking a random like take those days off even if you're not sick. I know that sounds bad. I don't really care. I genuinely think that, Like you pay for those days if sick days personal leave days were not. They are part of your workplace package. So if your work did not offer them, you would be getting more money, do you know what I mean? Like you are salary sacrificing in general to have these days off, so you have to use them if you have recently quit a job, or if you are about to quit the job that you just had call in sick for like the whole week. And I know people are going to be like that gives you a terrible reputation, that like really lets down your coworkers valid And maybe you're a better person than I am, but you will very quickly realize after you quit that job that it is not the whole world. Then it is not the whole universe. It's very easy to feel like the reputation you have at that workplace is going to follow you everywhere. Taking like a week of sick leave after you quit is not going to ruin your career, and in fact, I think it's probably good and will increase your performance at your next job to have that buffer. Second thing I would do if I wanted to get ahead. That one's not really a get ahead tip, that's just a fuon tip. That's a that's a lifestyle tip. My second tip for like getting ahead at work, though, that I did at my old job. At all my corporate jobs, reply to every single email you are c seed in, even the ones that like have nothing to do with you. Now obviously not like company wide email updates, but I mean, if you're on a project and somebody sees you, just for visibility, always email back. Always email back with a question, Always email back with something or other, Just so that your name, especially if you're in like a hierarchical like workplace, your name is visible, like the effort that you put in is visible. These are easy reputation bonus points, especially if you're a junior. You know, it makes you seem super engaged. It costs you like five minutes a day. Third tip, do not burn bridges at work. Do not, at any point you know, decide I don't need to be friends with this person. I don't need anything to do with this person. I am going to make the rash decision to just like to just cut them out. Or I'm bored by this person, or they're annoying me, so I'm going to stop replying to them, or I'm going to ignore them, or whatever it is. Like, even if this person is incredibly frustrating, even if you think you will never see them again, even if they are some distant connection that has royally pissed you off, do not burn that bridge. I can promise you right now, that person will come back around. You will see that person again at some point. It will be very awkward, obviously, if they're like really awful, You're allowed to distance yourself. But never think you're above anybody. Never think that you know more than anybody body. Never let your ego get in the way of being kind and respectful to people, because it will always come back to bite you. I would also say another big tip for my corporate people out there, my corporate twenty somethings. If your boss is doing your job for you, you are in trouble. I think this is like the clearest litmus test for like, if you're doing well at work, if you are doing your job and you are doing it okay, even doing exceptionally doing okay. If you're just doing your job and your boss isn't constantly like this is a mistake, I've had to fix this, blah blah blah bah blah, you're doing all right. If you find that your boss is suddenly having to make corrections having to ask you repeatedly for changes. If you're finding that you submit something and it comes out in a completely different manner, that's when I would really be scheduling that one on one and being like, what can I do and how can I do more? Doing that shows so much incentive. Like genuinely reaching out for feedback before feedback is provided gets you ahead of this problem and gets you ahead of like I don't know, not the consequences, but sometimes the embarrassment of not being told off, but being criticized, And when you get criticized like unexpectedly, that can be so painful. So that is my biggest tip. And also ask for help. People love it when you ask for help. They would rather that you ask for help then they have to ask you for corrections. That is something that when I was kind of a junior. I remember one of my mentors saying to me, she was like, I would much rather feel needed before the fact, then feel like then feel like you are needy afterwards, or feel like I suddenly have to do your job. I'd much rather hand hold than do myself if it means that the next time you were able to do it my final thing. And this has nothing to do with office politics workplace drama. Perhaps slightly it does, but just like general career advice, you are allowed to leave your job. You're allowed to quit, and you're allowed to quit inopportune times. You are allowed to leave because you just want to don't want to be there anymore. You are allowed to let people down, even if they are mentors, even if they are bosses you really want to impress. I think it's so important that we remember in our twenties, especially like, this is just a job. This is just a job. As much as the hours that work demands from us now get us really enmeshed in the identity of work and in the identity of our career. At the end of the day, your whole life could fall apart, and this would be the last thing you were thinking of. Well, hopefully it would be your whole life could fall apart and this workplace, this job could go and would go on without you. So make sure you have an identity outside of work. Make sure especially that you have friendships outside of work. Make sure that you are carving time outside of your job to be a human and not just a machine and not just a career or not just a workplace. Okay, that is my final tip for the day. I hope you enjoyed this episode and you enjoyed this little peek into the psychology behind office politics and how to navigate it a little bit better in our twenties. Thank you so much to our researcher Libby Colbert for her research contributions to this episode. She is, as always incredible. If you have made it this far, leave a comment down below. What was your first job? I feel like I've asked this question before, but yeah, what was your first job? Mine was at a Boost Juice, a smoothie shop in Australia, so I want to know what yours were. Make sure that if you are in the US, Australia, UK, Canada and New Zealand Southeast Asia, that you watch us on Netflix. I feel like we all know hopefully you guys all know this by now, but the podcast is on Netflix. You can go and watch full episodes there if you feel called to do so. You can also just listen here, but make sure that you are following along or subscribed wherever you are listening so you get new episodes. You can follow us on Instagram. You can follow us on substack. I feel like you guys hear this all the time. The links are in the description if you are searching for them. But until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very very soon.