Ongoing scholarly attention is directed to organizational responses to institutional complexity. However how heterogeneous institutional demands are processed by organizations is only marginally analyzed. We build on the concept of organizational decision-making as political processes to investigate how organizations internally and politically process heterogeneous demands, what kind of decision-making they apply and what effects thereof are. We build on the case of FIFA, the international football organization, and show, how the administration and the political leadership of FIFA have different modes of decision-making, whereas democratic administrative decision-making is often overruled or ignored by authoritarian leadership. This political drift, as we call it, explains, how organizations deal politically with institutional complexity and are thus able to address inconsistent, heterogeneous demands.
