MGMT 110 Lecture 7: Week 7 – Managing Power and Politics
Week 7 – Managing Power and Politics
• “Power is to organisation as oxygen is to breathing” – Stewart Clegg
• Organizations are made up of formal and informal rules that coordinate actions of
different people
• Organization politics are ubiquitous
• At the centre of organization politics is the fact that organizations are composed of
relations of power
• Power is the concept that encompasses the mechanisms, processes, and dispositions
that try to ensure that people act in ways that accord with senior management
intent as it is communicated through various devices
Power
• Power is the chance of an actor to realize their own will in a social action, even
against the resistance of others
• The actor may be an individual or a collective entity
• Power can mean forcing others to do things against their will
• Power can also be far more positive and less mechanical when it shapes and frames
what others want to do
• One form of power is getting people to agree with the leader (acquiesce)
• Domination – using power against the person’s will
• Structure dispositions and capacity for action as well as the action itself
Organizational Politics
• Organization politics refers to the network of social relations between people in and
around organizations – whether willingly or not, practices of power
• ‘Social and political skills [are] vital to managerial success’ (Douglas and Ammeter,
2004: 537)
• Everybody that works in an organisation plays a game of politics
Sources of Power
• Money
• Most organizations work on a bureaucratic model. There is hierarchy, division of
labour, prescription of roles, official positions, span of control, chain of command,
centralised authority, service of goals, strategy, vision, mission statements
- Positional power – power tied to authority
• Knowledge
• Intimidation
• Manipulation
• Skills and experience
Legitimacy
• Legitimacy attaches to something, whether a particular action or social structure,
when there is a widespread belief that it is just and valid
• Organizational legitimacy – people doing what is expected of them, their actions are
seen as desirable, proper or appropriate
• Possession of this distinguishes authority
• Defines the rights of management to get others to do things they may not otherwise
do
• Lowers the probability of resistance as authority bestowed by subordinates,
customers, suppliers, etc.
• Legitimacy is achieved through what Pettigrew called the ‘management of meaning’
a double action as it seeks to create legitimacy for one’s actions as it simultaneously
seeks to de-legitimize those it opposes
• Sources of legitimacy: images, symbols, giving certainty and security (e.g. churches,
banks), uniforms and insignia of rank
Obedience, Responsibilities and Ethics
• If legitimate power is taken to an extreme, it becomes dangerous
• The Milgram experiment (see pp 156-157)
- Could you do unimaginable things to others?
- Where people were told to give electric shocks to others
- The man in the white coat invested the actor with legitimacy – the other people
didn’t know he wasn’t actually someone in control
- They gave him more than was required and that was unethical because of his
perceived authority
Uncertainty
• Uncertainty is the inability to know how to continue some action, a lack of a rule or
undecidability about which rule to apply
• Rules are intended to take the uncertainty out of everyday work and organization
• Weber pointed out ways in which uncertainty was still present
- Used the example of the uncertainty that the elected members of a legislative
assembly experienced, in terms of parliamentary, budgetary, and other
procedures of rule, compared with the far more detailed and certain knowledge
of their senior permanent public servants
• People need skills to reduce uncertainty
• Power is not fixed, it can be increased
• Thompson (1956) study of US Air-force bomber wing commands – flight and ground
crews
- There was a pay difference
- The ground crew threatened they may not approve the aircraft fit for flying if
their pay needs weren’t met
• Crozier’s (1964) → French state owned tobacco factory – maintenance and
production workers
- study developed a theory called the ‘strategic contingences theory of intra-
organizational power’ → sought to build a theory from existing ideas, particularly
that power was related to the control of uncertainty
• Tannenbaum then developed a measurement of power – the control graph. The
graph maps the means of the perceived power of each level in the formal hierarchy
of an organization by averaging the sum of the perceptions of people in the
organization of the amount of power vested at various levels within it
Document Summary
Organizational politics: organization politics refers to the network of social relations between people in and around organizations whether willingly or not, practices of power. Social and political skills [are] vital to managerial success" (douglas and ammeter, 2004: 537: everybody that works in an organisation plays a game of politics. Sources of power: money, most organizations work on a bureaucratic model. There is hierarchy, division of labour, prescription of roles, official positions, span of control, chain of command, centralised authority, service of goals, strategy, vision, mission statements. Positional power power tied to authority: knowledge. If legitimate power is taken to an extreme, it becomes dangerous: the milgram experiment (see pp 156-157) Where people were told to give electric shocks to others. The man in the white coat invested the actor with legitimacy the other people didn"t know he wasn"t actually someone in control. They gave him more than was required and that was unethical because of his perceived authority.
