The ability to effectively navigate organizational politics to achieve one’s goals has long been recognized as necessary for individuals to experience success within their organizations. Many studies have linked the effective use of political behaviors to increased individual performance. As such, many scholars within HRD and other disciplines have created practitioner techniques and models to guide individuals in their pursuit of personal success within an organization. Although these tools are useful, there is no common theoretical framework that can ground these practices into theory and explain why some individuals can be successful in the pursuit of personal goals within the organization whereas others are not. This article introduces a cross-disciplinary framework for a theory of personal politics (TPP). TPP contends that individuals achieve their goals within an organization because they understand how the forces of multiple actors on multiple levels of analysis shape (drive or constrain) actor interactions within varying contexts. The creation of this framework and the ongoing development of the theory are based on the theory of international politics (TIP) authored by Kenneth Waltz, an international relations (IR) theorist for nearly 60 years.
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