Workplace Cliques: When Belonging Becomes Exclusion

Workplace cliques are often dismissed as gossip, favoritism, or ordinary personality conflict. But they can also be understood as structural features of organizational life.

This episode of The Psychology of Us explores how informal workplace groups form, why belonging can become exclusionary, and how cliques can harden into factions that reshape communication, loyalty, power, and accountability inside organizations.

Drawing on the work of RJ Starr, the episode examines the difference between healthy affiliation and oppositional belonging, the escalation from social clusters to factional structures, the role of information hoarding, performative loyalty, symbolic enemies, protected subcultures, and the leadership challenge of distinguishing legitimate concerns from factional grievance.

The episode offers a structural lens for understanding workplace cliques not merely as interpersonal drama, but as informal systems that can quietly alter how an organization actually functions.