Empire building is a business term that refers to a common problem in larger organizations, in which mid-level managers attempt to gather more control and funding in order to make themselves more powerful within the organization. This sort of behaviour is supposed to be stopped by upper management, but is nevertheless very common.

A fine example of empire building was demonstrated by Thomas Schicktanz of the Procter & Gamble Company, Mehoopany, Pennsylvania, USA throughout the 1970's and 80's.