Organizational Behaviour, emerging knowledge and practice for the real world, by S. McShane, M. Von Glinow (fifth edition) – Summary chapter 10

Power is the capacity of a person, team, or organization to influence others. Power is based on the target’s perception that the power holder controls. Power is also based on dependence, the target needs to believe that someone has access to a resource that can help or hinder him to achieve a goal. Countervailing power is the capacity of a person, team, or organization to keep a more powerful person or group in the exchange relationship. A minimum level of trust is crucial in order to have power. There are several sources of power:

1. Legitimate power (power from position)
   This is an agreement among organizational members that people in certain roles can request certain behaviours of others. This is usually the most important source of power in organizational settings. Legitimate power has restrictions; it gives the power holder only the right to ask others to perform a limited domain of behaviours. This is called the zone of indifference. Information control is a form of legitimate power.
2. Reward power (power from position)
   This is the power derived from a person’s ability to control the allocation of rewards valued by others and to remove negative sanctions.
3. Coercive power (power from position)
   This is the ability to apply punishment.
4. Expert power (power from characteristics)
   This is an individual’s or work unit’s capacity to influence others by possessing knowledge or skills valued by others. Expertise can help companies cope with uncertainties in three ways: prevention (1), forecasting (2) and absorption (3).
5. Referent power (power from characteristics)
   This is the capacity to influence others on the basis of identification with and respect for the power holder. Referent power is associated with charisma.

Humans have a norm of reciprocity, a felt obligation and social expectation to help someone who has previously helped you. This norm is a form of legitimate power because it is an informal rule of conduct we are expected to follow. Charisma is a personal characteristic that serves as a form of interpersonal attraction and referent power over others.

There are four important contingencies of power:

1. Substitutability
   Power is the strongest when the individual or work unit has a monopoly over a valued resource. Power decreases as the number of alternative sources of critical resource increases.
2. Centrality
   This refers to the power holder’s importance based on the degree and nature of interdependence with others. Centrality increases with the number of people dependent on you and how quickly and severely they are affected by that dependence.
3. Visibility
   Power increases with visibility. The more visible power cues are, the more power someone is perceived to have.
4. Discretion
   This is the freedom to make decisions without referring to a specific rule or receiving permission from someone else.

Social networks are social structures of individuals or social units that are connected to each other through one or more forms of interdependence. Social capital refers to the knowledge and other resources available to people or social units from a durable network that connects them to others. Social networks enhance and maintain the power of its members through information, visibility and referent power.

The volume of information, favours and other social capital that people receive from networks increases with the number of people connected to them. Strong ties are close-knit relationships. Strong ties offer resources more quickly and more plentiful than are available from weak ties. Strong ties also offer greater social support and greater cooperation for favours and assistance. Weak ties can be valuable because weak ties are often people who are less similar than ourselves and therefore offer resources we do not possess. The more central a person is located in the network, the more social capital and therefore the more power he acquires.

There are three factors that determine your centrality in a social network. Betweenness refers to how much you are located between others in the network. Degree centrality refers to the number or percentage of connections you have to others in the network. Closeness refers to the strength of ties with other people. A structural hole is an area between two or more dense social network areas that lack network ties. A broker is someone who connects two independent networks and brokers have more power.

Empowerment can increase motivation, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance, but people who feel empowered usually are more likely to rely on stereotypes, have difficulty empathizing and have less accurate perceptions. If an individual has power over others, people get a sense of responsibility for the people over whom the power holder has authority and this leads to less stereotyping.

Influence refers to any behaviour that attempts to alter someone’s attitudes or behaviour. Influence is power in motion. There are several ways to influence others:

1. Silent authority (hard tactic)
   This is influencing behaviour through legitimate power without explicitly referring to that power base.
2. Assertiveness (hard tactic)
   This is actively applying legitimate and coercive power by applying pressure or threat.
3. Information control (hard tactic)
   This is explicitly manipulating someone else’s access to information for the purpose of changing their attitude and/or behaviour.
4. Coalition forming (hard tactic)
   This is forming a group that attempts to influence others by pooling the resources and power of its members.
5. Upward appeal (hard tactic)
   This is symbolically or in reality relying on people with higher authority or expertise to support our position.
6. Persuasion (soft tactic)
   This is using logical arguments, factual evidence and emotional appeals to convince people of the value of a request.
7. Impression management (soft tactic)
   This is actively shaping, through self-presentation and other means, the perceptions and attitudes that others have of us. It includes ingratiation, which refers to the influencer’s attempt to be more liked by the targeted person or group.
8. Exchange (soft tactic)
   This is promising benefits or resources in exchange for the target person’s compliance.

There are three types of reactions when others try to influence them. Resistance occurs when people or work units oppose the behaviour desired by the influencer. Compliance occurs when people are motivated to implement the influencer’s request for purely instrumental reasons. Compliance relies on external sources to motivate the desired behaviour. Commitment is the strongest outcome of influence, whereby people identify with the influencer’s request and are highly motivated to implement it even when extrinsic sources of motivation are not present. People tend to react more favourable to soft tactics than to hard tactics. Soft tactics are influencing tactics that rely on personal sources of power and hard tactics are influencing tactics that rely on position power.

Organizational politics refers to behaviours that others perceive as self-serving tactics at the expense of other people and possibly the organization. Whether something is seen as organizational politics depends on the observer. Organizational politics is triggered by scarce resources in the workplace, by ambiguous or complex rules and by organizational change. It is also more common in work units and organizational where it is tolerated and reinforced. Machiavellian values are the beliefs that deceit is a natural and acceptable way to influence others and that getting more than one deserves is acceptable.