Why Decent People Learn to Play Dirty at Work

Two Organizations, Same People

There are two organizations. One never seems to have much infighting. The other runs like a palace drama every day.

Outsiders easily reach a conclusion: the people in the first have better morals, and the people in the second have worse. But if you have actually spent time among both groups, you will notice an awkward fact: there is no obvious moral difference between them. There are selfish people over there, and there are decent people here; there are people over there who love to claim credit, and there are people here who are willing to cover for others. What differs is the structure.

Turning scheming into a moral issue is the easiest and laziest explanation. It saves us from asking why the same people behave so differently when they move to a different organization, why some places fill up with people busy doing work while others fill up with people busy managing people, and why a person of integrity, once placed in a certain environment, has to learn to keep a low profile, pick sides, leave a paper trail, and fight for narrative control.

The answer usually sits in the organization's design: whether opportunities are scarce, whether evaluation is subjective, whether information is transparent, and whether promotion is a tournament based on relative ranking.

Where Scheming Doesn't Take Root

Look first at the places where there is relatively little scheming.

Why are startups in an expansion phase relatively simple? Because opportunities are not scarce. New businesses emerge every day, new positions are constantly created, and a person does not have to stare at the chair under someone else. If you create incremental value, you get a position; if you open a new battlefield, you become the person in charge of that new battlefield. When there are not enough existing positions, new ones fill the gap. People still compete, but the direction of competition is more about who can get things done first than about who can pull whom down first.

Why are purely sales-driven teams relatively transparent? Because the standard is not vague. Numbers are numbers, signed deals are signed deals, collections are collections. A leader can certainly play favorites, but favoritism needs an excuse, and in a place where the numbers are hard and cold, excuses are harder to find. You say he is good: what is his ranking? You say he is bad: how many clients has he lost? The more verifiable the standard, the smaller the room for political manipulation.

Why is there almost no politics in open-source communities? Because information is completely transparent. Who submitted which code, who fixed which vulnerability, who proposed the key solution and when: all of it is publicly checkable. Contributions cannot be hidden, and credit is hard to steal. A person may be good at telling stories, but the code record will not tell stories along with him. Information transparency takes narrative power out of the hands of a few.

Put these three types of organizations together, and you will find that they all lower three things: the scarcity of opportunities, the subjectivity of evaluation, and the asymmetry of information.

If an organization has an extremely narrow promotion channel, evaluation standards that depend on the leader's subjective feelings, and highly asymmetric information, it will most likely become politicized. The people are the same. The structure systematically rewards political behavior.

The Tournament Trap

Economics has a theory called tournament theory. It was originally used to explain pay and promotion: when a person's promotion depends on relative ranking rather than absolute performance, the organization becomes a competition. First place gets gold, second place gets silver, third place gets bronze. People remember the gold medal, and resources concentrate around it.

Tournaments are not inherently bad. In some settings they provide strong incentives: everyone runs hard for the ranking, and the organization as a whole benefits. But they have a side effect. Once promotion depends only on relative ranking and there are very few slots, improving yourself and lowering your opponent can become equivalent in payoff.

Here is an example. The company wants to promote a sales director. There is only one slot, and only the person ranked first in performance can be promoted. The person ranked second has a choice. He can keep working overtime to improve performance, but incremental gains are slow. He can also find ways to make the first person's numbers look bad. Spread a little negative information, steal a client, deliberately fail to cooperate at a key moment, and let the opponent make a big mess in front of the leader. These methods do not create value, but they change the ranking. As long as the payoff from damaging an opponent equals the payoff from improving yourself, and the cost of damage is low enough, political behavior will emerge.

Most second-place people will not do this. But the structure raises the expected return of such methods, and enough will. People may not have read tournament theory, but they have an intuition about payoff structures. They know that in a game of relative ranking, the opponent's failure and my success are the same thing in ranking terms.

The King's Horse

There is a classic story. An old king chooses a successor. He gives his two sons two identical horses and says: whoever's horse arrives at the opposite bank later wins. The elder son thinks about how to make his own horse slower. He lets it drink its fill, feeds it plenty of grass, checks its hooves, and busies himself for a long time without even mounting. The younger son hears the rule, mounts his elder brother's horse, whips it, and rides off, leaving his own horse to amble to the bank last.

This story is often used to illustrate cleverness versus foolishness. More accurately, it illustrates rule arbitrage. The goal of the contest is not to make your horse fast but to make your horse arrive later. The moment the rule becomes a relative ranking, the younger son immediately realizes: my elder brother's horse can also be my horse, as long as I can seize the reins.

What the second-place colleague at work does to the first-place colleague follows the same logic mathematically. He is not worse. He has simply understood the contest faster. In a game of relative ranking, the key is not how well you feed your own horse but how to make your opponent's horse fail to run, or simply ride your opponent's horse away. Advanced scheming is often not direct confrontation but changing the conditions of the contest: seizing the reins, changing the track, making sure the referee cannot see, and making the opponent drop the ball at a key moment.

The core of scheming is rule arbitrage. When the rules reward ranking rather than value, people manage their ranking. When the rules allow information asymmetry, people hoard information. When the rules let the leader's impression determine success or failure, people manage impressions.

Seven Behaviors the Structure Produces

If an organization has an extremely narrow promotion channel, evaluation standards that depend on the leader's subjective feelings, and highly asymmetric information, it will produce a whole set of political behaviors.

First, information hoarding. Whoever knows more has more room for arbitrage. Information is no longer just work material; it is a resource of power. What should be synchronized is not synchronized, what should be disclosed is not disclosed, and key news circulates in small circles. The bigger the information gap, the bigger the political space.

Second, managing upward. When evaluation is subjective, the leader's feelings become hard currency. So people study what the leader likes and dislikes, when the leader is in a good mood, and what should be said on what occasion. Work reports stop being reports on work and become performances of loyalty, displays of hardship, and construction of a persona.

Third, alliances and taking sides. When information is asymmetric, individual risk is high, and small circles provide protection and intelligence. So people start looking for their own people, start exchanging news, and start echoing each other in key meetings. Taking sides is not because people are born to form cliques; it is because those who do not take sides are more easily swallowed by the information black box.

Fourth, bottlenecking and non-cooperation. Making an opponent drop the ball at a key moment is cheaper than creating incremental value yourself. Delay a process, hold back a resource, go cold on collaboration. On the surface none of it looks like a major fault, but in practice it can be enough to make an opponent miss a window.

Fifth, credit-grabbing and blame-shifting. When contributions cannot be verified, narrative power matters more than facts. Whoever reports first defines the credit; whoever distances himself first reduces responsibility. So people start leaving paper trails, taking screenshots, copying others on emails, and writing minutes. A paper trail is originally meant to create transparency, but in a politicized organization it can also become a tool for self-protection.

Sixth, performative work. Overtime does not necessarily create value, but overtime can be seen. Reporting does not necessarily advance work, but reporting can influence impressions. Process does not necessarily control risk, but process can prove I did something. When evaluation is subjective, visible performance crowds out invisible value.

Seventh, bad money drives out good. People with high ability but low political skill leave first, and those who remain are better adapted to political competition. The organization may not lack talent. Talent discovers that here, being good at doing work is less important than being good at playing the game, and creating incremental value is less important than fighting over existing value. So they either leave or change.

This is why a person of integrity who goes there will also participate, only with more concealed methods. Moral restraint does not disappear, but it changes the cost and form of destructive methods; it does not change the direction of incentives. When the structure raises the expected return of taking out an opponent to roughly the same level as improving yourself, those who do not participate bear the ranking loss. A person of integrity may not spread rumors, but he may have to learn to leave a paper trail, report upward, form alliances, and hold a position. The structure leaves no clean exit for the person who refuses to play.

Structure Is First-Order, Morality Is Second

Structure determines incentives. It does not completely determine behavior. The claim that this structure necessarily leads to scheming is too absolute. What it does is systematically raise the return on political behavior and turn political skill into promotion capital.

Several buffer variables sit in between.

How high is the probability that destructive behavior will be discovered? How heavy is the punishment? If rumors are investigated, client-stealing is penalized, and process-bottlenecking is audited, the cost of political behavior goes up. Are evaluation metrics verifiable? If contributions can be cross-checked through data, client feedback, and long-term records, the subjective space shrinks. Does the leader deliberately create zero-sum games? Some leaders like horse racing, deliberately making subordinates check and balance each other while they act as referee. Others are willing to create more tracks and more incremental opportunities. Does the organization have appeal, calibration, and audit mechanisms? Are there exit options? When external opportunities are plentiful, the appeal of internal politics declines. Culture also matters. Culture does not change incentives, but it affects which methods are seen as legitimate and which will be reported.

Structure is first-order. Morality is second-order. Morality matters. But if you use it to explain everything, you will miss what can actually be changed.

Governance That Makes Creation Pay

If scheming is the product of organizational rents and ranking contests, the direction of governance is clear.

Reduce the scarcity of opportunities: create more incremental value, set up more tracks, run professional and managerial ladders in parallel, and stop making everyone crowd onto a single narrow bridge.

Reduce subjective evaluation: use absolute metrics, verifiable contributions, multi-evaluator calibration, long-term records, and clear rules for client ownership.

Reduce information asymmetry: disclose information, leave process trails, audit abnormal data, and increase cross-department visibility.

Reduce the payoff from destruction: use team metrics, mutual-evaluation constraints, double review at key nodes, and whistleblower protection.

Reduce the leader's discretionary rent: set promotion standards in advance, use committee decisions, and establish appeal mechanisms.

The goal is to make creating incremental value more worthwhile than fighting over existing value. Expanding startups, pure sales teams, and open-source communities are relatively simple not because the people there are nobler, but because their structures make creating value more advantageous than fighting over value. Conversely, narrow channels, subjective evaluation, and information black boxes make fighting over existing value more advantageous than creating incremental value.

The people are the same. When the payoff structure changes, behavior changes.

Next time you see an organization that runs like a palace drama every day, skip the question about why these people are so bad. Ask whether opportunities are too few, whether evaluation is too subjective, whether information is too dark. If the answer to all three is yes, then scheming is the organization producing political animals according to its own rules.

Stop asking why people are bad. Ask what the structure rewards. If it rewards creation, people create. If it rewards fighting, people fight. Morality stands behind the incentive structure. Good governance makes it more worthwhile to be a gentleman than a petty schemer.