1. law, govt and politics
2. politics

Organizational
Behavior, 8e
Schermerhorn, Hunt, and
Osborn
Prepared by
Michael K. McCuddy
Valparaiso University
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
2
Chapter 15
Power and Politics
 Study questions.
– What is power?
– How do managers acquire the power needed
for leadership?
– What is empowerment, and how can managers
empower others?
– What are organizational politics?
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
3
Chapter 15
Power and Politics
 Study questions.
– How do organizational politics affect
managers and management?
– Can the firm use politics strategically?
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
4
What is power?
 Power is the ability to …
– Get someone to do something you want done.
– Make things happen in the way you want.
 Influence is …
– What you have when you exercise power.
– Expressed by others’ behavioral response to
your exercise of power.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Position power.
– Derives from organizational sources.
– Types of position power.
•
•
•
•
•
•
Reward power.
Coercive power.
Legitimate power.
Process power.
Information power.
Representative power.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Reward power.
– The extent to which a manager can use
extrinsic and intrinsic rewards to control other
people.
– Success in accessing and utilizing rewards
depends on manager’s skills.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Coercive power.
– The extent to which a manager can deny
desired rewards or administer punishments to
control other people.
– Availability varies from one organization and
manager to another.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Legitimate power.
– Also known as formal hierarchical authority.
– The extent to which a manager can use
subordinates’ internalized values or beliefs that
the “boss” has a “right of command” to control
their behavior.
– If legitimacy is lost, authority will not be
accepted by subordinates.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Process power.
– The control over methods of production and
analysis.
– Places an individual in the position of:
• Influencing how inputs are transformed into
outputs.
• Controlling the analytical process used to make
choices.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Information power.
– The access to and/or control of information.
– May complement legitimate hierarchical
power.
– May be granted to specialists and managers in
the middle of the information system.
– People may “protect” information in order to
increase their power.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Representative power.
– The formal right conferred by the firm to
speak as a representative for a potentially
important group composed of individuals
across departments or outside the firm.
– Helps complex organizations deal with a
variety of constituencies.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Personal power.
– Derives from individual sources.
– Types of personal power.
• Expert power.
• Rational persuasion.
• Referent power.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Expert power.
– The ability to control another person’s
behavior through the possession of knowledge,
experience, or judgment that the other person
needs but does not have.
– Is relative, not absolute.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Rational persuasion.
– The ability to control another person’s
behavior by convincing the other person of the
desirability of a goal and a reasonable way of
achieving it.
– Much of a supervisor’s daily activity involves
rational persuasion.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is power?
 Referent power.
– The ability to control another’s behavior
because the person wants to identify with the
power source.
– Can be enhanced by linking to morality and
ethics and long-term vision.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Acquiring and using power and influence.
– A considerable portion of any manager’s time
is directed toward power-oriented behavior.
– Power-oriented behavior is action directed at
developing or using relationships in which
other people are willing to defer wholly or
partially to one’s wishes.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Acquiring and using power and influence.
– Three dimensions of managerial power and
influence.
• Downward.
• Upward.
• Lateral.
– Effective managers build and maintain
position power and personal power to exercise
downward, upward, and lateral influence.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Building position power by:
– Increasing centrality and criticality in the
organization.
– Increasing task relevance of own activities and
work unit’s activities.
– Attempting to define tasks so they are difficult
to evaluate.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Building personal power by:
– Building expertise.
• Advanced training and education, participation in
professional associations, and project involvement.
– Learning political savvy.
• Learning ways to negotiate, persuade, and understand goals
and means that others accept.
– Enhancing likeability.
• Pleasant personality characteristics, agreeable behavior
patterns, and attractive personal appearance.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Managers increase the visibility of their job
performance by:
– Expanding contacts with senior people.
– Making oral presentations of written work.
– Participating in problem-solving task forces.
– Sending out notices of accomplishment.
– Seeking opportunities to increase name
recognition.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Additional tactics for acquiring and using
power and influence.
– Using coalitions and networks to alter the flow
of information and the analytical context.
– Controlling, or at least influencing, decision
premises.
– Making one’s own goals and needs clear.
– Bargaining effectively regarding one’s
preferred goals and needs.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Common strategies for turning power into
relational influence.
– Reason.
– Friendliness.
– Coalition.
– Bargaining.
– Assertiveness.
– Higher authority.
– Sanctions.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Power, formal authority, and obedience.
– The Milgram experiments.
• Designed to determine the extent to which people
obey the commands of an authority figure, even
under the belief of life-threatening conditions.
• The results indicated that the majority of the
experimental subjects would obey the commands
of the authority figure.
• Raised concerns about compliance and obedience.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Obedience and the acceptance of authority.
– Chester Barnard argued that:
• Authority derives from the “consent of the
governed.”
• Subordinates accept or follow a directive only
under special circumstances.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Obedience and the acceptance of authority
— cont.
– For a directive to be accepted as authoritative,
the subordinate:
• Can and must understand it.
• Must feel mentally and physically capable of
carrying it out.
• Must believe that it is consistent with the
organization’s purpose.
• Must believe that it is consistent with his or her
personal interests.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do managers acquire the
power needed for leadership?
 Obedience and the acceptance of authority
— cont.
– Directives that meet the four criteria will be
accepted as authoritative since they fall within
the “zone of indifference.”
– Directives falling within the zone are obeyed.
– Directives falling outside the zone are not
obeyed.
– The zone is not fixed over time.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is empowerment, and how can
managers empower others?
 Empowerment.
– The process by which managers help others to acquire
and use the power needed to make decisions affecting
themselves and their work.
– Considers power to be something that can be shared
by everyone working in flatter and more collegial
organizations.
– Provides the foundation for self-managing work teams
and other employee involvement groups.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is empowerment, and how can
managers empower others?
 The power keys to empowerment.
– Traditional view.
• Power is relational in terms of individuals.
– Empowerment view.
• Emphasis is on the ability to make things happen.
• Power is relational in terms of problems and
opportunities, not individuals.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is empowerment, and how can
managers empower others?
 The power keys to empowerment.
– Ways to empower others.
• Changing position power.
• Expanding the zone of indifference.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is empowerment, and how can
managers empower others?
 Power as an expanding pie.
– With empowerment, employees must be
trained to expand their power and their new
influence potential.
– Empowerment changes the dynamics between
supervisors and subordinates.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What is empowerment, and how can
managers empower others?
 Ways to expand power.
– Clearly define roles and responsibilities.
– Provide opportunities for creative problem solving
coupled with the discretion to act.
– Emphasize different ways of exercising influence.
– Provide support to individuals so they become
comfortable with developing their power.
– Expand inducements for thinking and acting, not just
obeying.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What are organizational politics?
 Machiavellian tradition of organizational
politics.
– Emphasizes self-interest and the use of
nonsanctioned means.
– Organizational politics is defined as the
management of influence to obtain ends not
sanctioned by the organization or to obtain
sanctioned ends through nonsanctioned
influence means.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What are organizational politics?
 Alternate tradition of organizational
politics.
– Politics is a necessary function resulting from
differences in the self-interests of individuals.
– Politics is the art of creative compromise
among competing interests.
– Politics is the use of power to develop socially
acceptable ends and means that balance
individual and collective interests.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What are organizational politics?
 Positive aspects of organizational politics.
– Overcoming personnel inadequacies.
– Coping with change.
– Substituting for formal authority.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What are organizational politics?
 Organizational politics and self-protection.
– Common self-protection strategies.
• Avoiding action and risk taking.
• Redirecting accountability and responsibility.
• Defending turf.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What are organizational politics?
 Common techniques for avoiding action
and risk taking.
– Working to the rule.
– Playing dumb.
– Depersonalization.
– Stalling.
• Routine.
• Creative.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What are organizational politics?
 Common techniques for redirecting
accountability and responsibility.
– Passing the buck.
– Buffing (or rigorous documentation).
– Rewriting history.
– Scapegoating.
– Blaming the problem on uncontrollable events.
– Escalating commitment to a losing course of action.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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What are organizational politics?
 Common techniques for defending turf.
– Expanding the jobs performed by the work
unit.
– Forming and using coalitions.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do organizational politics affect
managers and management?
 Managers may gain a better understanding
of political behavior by placing themselves
in the positions of other persons involved
in critical decisions or events.
 This understanding can be facilitated with
the use of a payoff matrix analysis.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do organizational politics affect
managers and management?
 Political action and subunit power.
– Common types of lateral, intergroup
relationships where political action occurs.
• Work-flow linkage.
• Service ties.
• Advisory connections.
• Auditing linkages.
• Approval linkages.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do organizational politics affect
managers and management?
 Political action in the chief executive suite.
– Executive behavior can sometimes be
explained in terms of resource dependencies.
– Resource dependence increases as:
• Needed resources become more scarce.
• Outsiders have more control over needed
resources.
• There are fewer substitutes for a particular type of
resource controlled by a limited number of
outsiders.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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How do organizational politics affect
managers and management?
 Strategies for managing resource
dependencies.
– Developing workable compromises among
competing resource dependencies.
– Altering the firm’s degree of resource
dependence.
– Redefining how the firm expects to conduct
business in the international arena.
– Determining the proper level of executive pay.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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Can the firm use politics strategically?
 There is growing awareness of the importance of
political strategy for business firms.
 In the United States, corporate political strategy
advises managers to:
– Engage in the public political process.
– Turn the government from an industry regulator to an
industry protector.
– Decide when and how to get involved in the public
policy process.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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Can the firm use politics strategically?
 Organizational governance.
– The pattern of authority, influence, and
acceptable managerial behavior established at
the top of the organization.
– Significantly determined by the effective
control of key resources by members of a
dominant coalition.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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Can the firm use politics strategically?
 Organizational governance implications.
– The daily practice of governance is the
development and resolution of issues.
– Governance is becoming more public and
open.
– Imbalanced governance by some U.S.
corporations may limit their ability to manage
global operations effectively.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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Can the firm use politics strategically?
 Organizational governance implications.
– While governance is often closely tied to the
short-term interests of stockholders and pay of
CEOs, some firms are expanding governance
interests to include employees and
communities.
– Governance should have an ethical basis.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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Can the firm use politics strategically?
 A person’s behavior must satisfy the
following criteria to be ethical:
– The behavior must produce the greatest good
for the greatest number of people.
– The behavior must respect the rights of all
affected parties.
– The behavior must respect the rules of justice.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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Can the firm use politics strategically?
 CEOs and employees may justify unethical
actions by suggesting that the behavior:
– Is not really illegal and so could be moral.
– Appears to be in the firm’s best interest.
– Is unlikely to be detected.
– Demonstrates loyalty.
Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15
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