The Subtle Art of Power 

What we can learn about power from rock, paper, scissors 

When my daughter was little, we used to play rock, paper, scissors, sometimes to settle minor disagreements and sometimes just for fun. The rules were simple. Rock crushes scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers rock. 

One day, she stopped and asked, “Mama, why does paper beat rock? It doesn’t make sense.” 

Well, she had a point. Rock can crush scissors. Scissors can cut paper. But paper covers rock, and somehow that counts as a victory? What exactly is the rock supposed to do, surrender under the weight of a sheet of paper? 

I found myself wondering who had decided that paper should beat rock in the first place. 

Of course, those are the rules. We learn them, accept them, and play accordingly. Most of us never question why covering something constitutes defeating it. We’re too busy trying to win. 

My daughter was questioning something the rest of us had simply learned to accept. I’ve often wondered how much of our understanding of power works the same way. 

We tend to think of power as something a person possesses. Someone has authority, influence, expertise, or control over important decisions. We describe people as powerful or powerless, as though power were a relatively stable characteristic. 

But consider our little game. Rock is powerful in relation to scissors and powerless in relation to paper. Its position changes depending on what it encounters, and neither relationship makes sense without understanding the rules. 

Power in organizations also depends on relationships, circumstances, and the formal and informal arrangements that determine whose contributions count. Some arrangements serve legitimate purposes. Others persist because they’ve become familiar or advantageous to those who already possess influence. 

Familiarity can make these arrangements appear inevitable. We learn how things work and become skilled at navigating them, sometimes without considering why they work that way. 

How We Learn the Rules of Power 

We begin learning about authority long before we understand the concept of power. As children, adults make decisions about what we’re allowed to do and which choices are available to us. Through those experiences, we develop expectations about whether questions are welcomed, disagreement is tolerated, and rules can be challenged. These experiences don’t determine how we’ll relate to authority as adults, but they can influence the assumptions we bring into the workplace. 

Organizations have their own rules, many of which are never explicitly explained. Formal authority is usually easy to identify. We know who approves expenditures, assigns responsibilities, and makes hiring decisions. But influence isn’t distributed solely through job titles. A manager may control someone’s assignments while depending on that person’s expertise. An employee may have little formal authority but be sufficiently trusted that colleagues regularly seek their judgment. 

Organizational researchers Joe Magee and Adam Galinsky distinguish power from status. Power concerns control over valued resources, while status concerns the respect and regard someone receives from others. The two can reinforce each other, but they aren’t identical. A manager can require compliance without earning commitment, while someone with little formal authority may exercise considerable influence through expertise and trust. 

A leader who mistakes compliance for commitment may believe they have more influence than they actually do. 

Organizations also develop unwritten expectations about whose support matters, who gets consulted before decisions are made, and whether challenging established thinking is welcomed or discouraged. 

An organization might describe itself as collaborative while important decisions are routinely made by a small group. It might claim that advancement is based on performance while repeatedly selecting people who have greater visibility among senior leaders. 

These inconsistencies aren’t always deliberate. Decision-makers have incomplete information, familiar relationships are easier to rely on, and established practices can continue without examination. Whatever their origins, employees learn from what happens. When formal rules say one thing and experience teaches another, experience often becomes the more reliable guide. 

These patterns can reinforce themselves. An employee regularly included in important discussions gains information and opportunities to demonstrate judgment. Someone who is rarely included has fewer opportunities to demonstrate the same capabilities. Eventually, the first employee may be regarded as having greater leadership potential, even when that assessment partly reflects opportunities that weren’t equally available. 

Organizations can begin confusing the qualities they’ve learned to recognize with the qualities that actually make someone capable. 

Why We Sometimes Reject the Game 

I’ve encountered many people who want nothing to do with office politics. They want to do good work, treat others fairly, and avoid the maneuvering that sometimes accompanies organizational life. 

I understand the sentiment. When politics means manipulation, favoritism, or using relationships to gain advantages at someone else’s expense, there are good reasons to object. 

But I’ve noticed something curious. People who insist they don’t participate in office politics can often describe, in considerable detail, who has influence, whose ideas receive attention, and which decisions were made before the official meeting ever took place. 

They understand how power operates. What they object to is how other people use it. Sometimes, however, rejecting those behaviors becomes confused with rejecting participation in power altogether. 

For some people, the objection comes from a deeply held understanding of fairness. They believe competence and contribution should determine how people are recognized. They resent the suggestion that doing good work isn’t enough. 

There’s considerable ethical substance to that position. But good work doesn’t become visible to an organization independently of human judgment. Someone must know what has been accomplished, understand its relevance, and recognize its contribution. 

Consider two capable employees who produce excellent work. One believes their work should speak for itself and avoids developing relationships with senior leaders because they don’t want to play politics. The other builds relationships across departments, understands organizational priorities, and communicates how their work contributes to broader goals. 

When an opportunity becomes available, the second employee may be better positioned to influence the decision. Neither is necessarily more deserving. We might reasonably question whether the organization has done enough to recognize the first employee’s contributions, but decision-makers also rely on the information available to them. Relationships influence how that information reaches them. 

Gerald Ferris and his colleagues describe organizational political skill as the ability to understand people and social situations and use that understanding effectively in interpersonal relationships. That capacity isn’t inherently manipulative. 

Imagine introducing a process that will affect several departments. You could present a carefully developed proposal and expect everyone to recognize its merits. Or you could consult the people affected, understand their constraints, address legitimate concerns, and involve them in developing a workable approach. 

The second option requires political awareness. It also treats people as participants whose perspectives deserve consideration. 

Political skill can certainly be used to manipulate, exclude, or gain unjustified advantages. Understanding influence doesn’t determine the ethics of its use. And learning to navigate an organization’s informal rules doesn’t necessarily make those rules fairer. 

Suppose an employee recognizes that advancement depends heavily on access to senior leaders. They cultivate those relationships and become more successful. Their success doesn’t establish that the arrangement is fair. Equally capable colleagues may still lack access to the same opportunities. 

An individual can learn to operate effectively within a system without improving the system itself. 

For employees with limited authority, challenging unfair practices can carry genuine risks. Someone who depends on their position for financial security may reasonably decide that confrontation isn’t worth the possible consequences. Choosing not to challenge a situation can be thoughtful and principled. The question is whether we’re making that choice with an understanding of how power operates, rather than assuming that refusing to participate places us beyond its influence. 

When We Become the People Making the Rules 

Most of us know what it’s like to be affected by someone else’s authority. We may remember carefully choosing our words, anticipating a manager’s reaction, or deciding that disagreement wasn’t worth the possible consequences. 

Yet acquiring authority doesn’t necessarily preserve our awareness of what that experience was like. 

Consider an employee who spent years frustrated by an organization in which visibility seemed to matter more than contribution. Eventually, that employee becomes a senior leader, responsible for assigning opportunities and identifying people ready for greater responsibility. 

Their values haven’t changed. They still believe people should be recognized fairly. But they now have limited time, incomplete information, and more decisions to make than they can investigate personally. Some employees regularly communicate with them and participate in discussions. Others do excellent work with relatively little direct contact. 

When an opportunity arises, the leader naturally thinks of people whose judgment they’ve had opportunities to observe. Without intending to, they may begin reproducing the same pattern that frustrated them earlier in their career. Familiarity begins to look like competence, visibility like initiative, and agreement like sound judgment. 

The rules they once resented may now be reinforced through their own decisions. 

Research by Dacher Keltner and his colleagues proposes that greater power can encourage people to pursue goals more freely while paying less attention to potential constraints. Lower power can increase attention to risks and possible consequences. These are general tendencies rather than inevitable effects, but they help explain why people may experience the same interaction differently. 

Imagine a manager who enjoys debating ideas and encourages employees to challenge assumptions. From the manager’s perspective, disagreement is part of productive collaboration. An employee may be considering something else. The manager controls their performance evaluation, assignments, and opportunities for advancement. The employee may wonder what will happen if they disagree. 

Elizabeth Morrison’s research on employee voice and silence examines how people decide whether to raise concerns or withhold information. Their decisions are influenced by whether they expect speaking to be useful and what consequences they anticipate. 

A leader who invites honest feedback cannot assume that the invitation eliminates those concerns. Silence isn’t necessarily agreement. 

Employees notice what happens when someone disagrees, makes a mistake, or raises an uncomfortable question. A leader may believe they’re approachable because they intend to be approachable. Employees form their judgments from what happens when they approach. 

Authority also changes how ordinary interactions are interpreted. A leader’s casual suggestion may be understood as an instruction. Questions intended to encourage deeper thinking may be experienced as criticism, particularly when earlier interactions have made employees cautious. 

The leader who once carefully monitored a manager’s reactions may now wonder why employees seem reluctant to disagree with them. Meanwhile, organizational practices they once questioned may begin to seem necessary. Informal consultation feels efficient. Relying on familiar employees seems reasonable. Concentrating decision-making authority appears essential for accountability. 

Sometimes those judgments are justified. Leaders face constraints that aren’t always visible to others. But explaining why a practice developed doesn’t establish that it remains the fairest or most effective approach. 

Using Power Without Making It About Control 

Power often has an unpleasant reputation because we associate it with intimidation, coercion, favoritism, and the pursuit of personal advantage. Yet leadership necessarily involves influence. Leaders establish expectations, allocate resources, make decisions, and affect the conditions under which other people work. 

Nor would eliminating authority necessarily improve an organization. People need clarity about responsibilities, accountability, and how decisions will be made. 

Consider a leader responsible for an important project. They could retain control over every consequential decision, believing that close supervision is the best way to ensure a good outcome. Employees would know whose approval they needed, but might also learn that exercising independent judgment has little value. 

Alternatively, the leader could clarify the project’s objectives, establish appropriate boundaries, and give capable employees meaningful authority over their work. The leader remains accountable, but their authority creates opportunities for others to exercise judgment and develop experience. 

Leaders need to distinguish between authority they must exercise and authority they’ve simply become accustomed to exercising. 

The opportunities leaders distribute also shape who develops the experience and credibility needed for future responsibility. If important assignments consistently go to employees already regarded as capable, those employees receive more opportunities to demonstrate capability. Others may be overlooked because they lack experience, even though previous decisions have limited their opportunities to acquire it. 

The same pattern can emerge around disagreement. If employees learn that challenging decisions leads to defensiveness or unfavorable consequences, they may stop offering alternative perspectives. The leader encounters less resistance and may mistake that experience for evidence that their judgment is widely trusted. 

Their authority has helped create the conditions through which they now interpret their own effectiveness. 

Leaders have an opportunity to examine how information reaches them, whose contributions are recognized, and whether established practices continue to serve the purposes for which they were created. 

But there’s a more uncomfortable possibility. 

Sometimes our objection to an organization’s rules is inseparable from our position within them. We may genuinely believe that advancement should reflect competence rather than personal relationships while also resenting our exclusion from the relationships that provide access to opportunity. 

Both can be true. 

Suppose we eventually gain that access. We develop relationships with senior leaders, become included in important conversations, and begin receiving opportunities that were previously unavailable. 

The system hasn’t necessarily become fairer, but our experience of it has changed. What once looked like favoritism may now seem like the natural consequence of professional credibility. We may believe we’ve earned our position without considering whether equally capable people remain excluded. 

Would we still consider the rules unfair if we were the ones consistently benefiting from them? 

It’s easier to recognize unfairness when we’re disadvantaged by an arrangement than when it works in our favor. Our commitment to fairness becomes more demanding when acting on it might require questioning an advantage we’ve come to enjoy. 

Integrity asks whether we’re willing to apply the same standards when doing so might cost us an advantage. 

My daughter’s question about paper beating rock was wonderfully uncomplicated. She noticed that something didn’t make sense to her and wanted to know why. 

We could have explained the rules and continued playing. After all, it’s only a children’s game. Nobody needs a committee to reconsider whether paper should be allowed to defeat rock. 

But organizational life isn’t a children’s game. The arrangements through which power operates affect people’s opportunities, livelihoods, relationships, and ability to contribute. 

We learn to navigate those arrangements, sometimes so successfully that we stop questioning them. And when we acquire authority, we may begin reinforcing practices we once resented because they now seem practical, familiar, or necessary. 

Paper beats rock because that’s how we’ve agreed to play. The rules of organizational life are more consequential, and we don’t all have an equal say in establishing them. 

Those of us who acquire the authority to influence those rules have a responsibility to remember what it was like when we didn’t. 

For Reflection 

1. What unwritten rules have you learned to accept in your organization? Which have you questioned, and which have become so familiar that you rarely notice them? 

2. Think of an organizational practice you’ve considered unfair. Would you still object to it if you were among those benefiting from it? 

3. Where might your own influence be shaping opportunities for others? Consider whose ideas you hear, whose judgment you trust, and whose contributions you may be overlooking. 

4. What is one rule you now have the power to influence that you once wished someone else would change? 

References 

Ferris, G. R., Treadway, D. C., Kolodinsky, R. W., Hochwarter, W. A., Kacmar, C. J., Douglas, C., & Frink, D. D. (2005). Development and validation of the Political Skill Inventory. Journal of Management, 31(1), 126–152.

Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284.

Magee, J. C., & Galinsky, A. D. (2008). Social hierarchy: The self-reinforcing nature of power and status. Academy of Management Annals, 2(1), 351–398.

Morrison, E. W. (2014). Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 173–197.

Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79–107.