Dividend Policy

The board is sitting around looking at its fat cash stack. Think: Apple in the heydey of its iPhone growth. The company had several hundred billion dollars in cash, virtually no debt, and it still paid no dividend. So hostile shareholders threatening to do bad things to the company cajoled the board into changing its dividend policy from "no, nothing, nada, zip" to "eh...we'll pay out $3B a quarter for a while, and up that number over time so that we can return some of our lavish cash to our shareholders."

That then became Apple's dividend policy, which, in most companies, gets addressed and readdressed about every year, as it is determined by the board of directors.

See: Payout Ratio.