Caustic internal politics in my experience seem to come from two things:

1 - lack of a clear direction and focus

2 - lack of good clear and transparent communication

No matter what, you are going to have politics in an organization, a good leader needs to direct the tone and shape of those politics.

With #1 - you end up with multiple people jockeying for ad hoc positions of leadership in an organization. A clear organizational structure (it doesn't have to be a complex hierarchy) with clear and transparent methods for moving up down and across it, prevents this. I see this mistake being made often with "flat organizations" where that's a code word for "no organizational structure" and you end up with powerful personalities in charge of little fiefdoms they've carved out in the company each with their own set of rules and politics. Nothing sucks more or wastes more company time and resources than playing Game of Thrones with all the assertive personalities in your company.

Some "code words" that might mean a place suffers or will eventually suffer from this: "flat organization", "no manager titles", "hands-off leadership", "management that gets out of the way" etc.

I'm not saying these are always indicative of a cultural problems, a flat organization can still be well structured and have strong focus, or a manager may have gifted the mantle of leadership onto somebody else for the duration of a project and taken a "hands off approach". But in my experience this is pretty rare.

This doesn't eliminate politics, but it makes it take the shape of people who want to align with the focus and people who want to go a different direction. This becomes a high level metric you can use to evaluate reports. If they aren't with the program then perhaps they should go work elsewhere?

With #2 - information vacuums breed rumors and rumor trading/gossiping becomes information control, another kind of leadership metric. The kind of backstabbery and reputation ruining gossip only breeds in organizations where intentions and direction and expectations of the company are not clearly communicated.

I remember one place I worked at, over a 6 month period, a bunch of senior managers all left. There was zero communication about this and rumors started running around "the CEO has lost his mind!" "I heard this guy was having an affair with the receptionist" "this group is going to be next!" "I be we're running out of money!" etc. etc. turns out two things were actually happening, the technology platform was changing and many of the senior managers weren't comfortable with this and wanted out. The CEO thanked them for their years of hard work and gave them a few weeks to find something else as a token of thanks. The other was that he wanted to grow the company and needed a different team to get him there -- his previous team was excellent for early stage growth, but the kind of loner term growth just needed a different set of skills. These two events coincided, were easily explainable and would have squashed most of the rumor trading. But the company had a culture of secrecy, starting at the top, and rumor trading became the cultural norm in the company. People probably spent as much time gossiping as they did getting work done, and it wasn't an effective organization at the time.

In other cases, I've seen this used specifically as a proxy for keeping the employees well managed. Spread disinformation from the top and watch the employees fight with each other over conflicting stories. They won't be fighting for actual positional authority and you, as the CxO, can be free to do what you want. It's called "Machiavellianism" and they make probably with worst places on the planet to work outside of a traditional leather factory.