Organizational Power Dynamics: Tactics and Collaboration

Posted on Jan 13, 2025 in Business Administration and Management (BAM)

Political Activity in Organizations

Political Activity: When uncertainty is high and disagreement arises, three domains of political activity in most organizations are structural change, management succession, and resource allocation.

Tactics for Increasing the Power Base

(Allocation of power is not random)

  1. Enter areas of high uncertainty (If you can identify and remove them, your power base increases).
  2. Create dependencies (When the organization depends on a department for information, materials, knowledge, or skills, that department will hold power over others. This power can be increased by incurring obligations).
  3. Provide resources (Departments that accumulate resources and provide them to an organization in the form of money, information, or facilities will be powerful.)
  4. Satisfy strategic contingencies (A contingency could be a critical event, a task for which there are no substitutes, or a central task that is interdependent with many others in the organization.)

Political Tactics for Using Power

(Requires both skill and willingness)

  1. Build coalitions and expand networks. Coalition building means taking the time to talk with other managers to persuade them to your point of view. Networks can be expanded by (1) reaching out to establish contact with additional managers and (2) co-opting dissenters.
  2. Assign loyal people to key positions. Top leaders frequently use this tactic. Top managers as well as department heads often use the hiring, transfer, and promotion processes to place in key positions people who are sympathetic to the outcomes of the department, thus helping to achieve departmental goals.
  3. Control decision premises. It means to constrain the boundaries of a decision. Decision premises can be influenced by choosing or limiting information provided to other managers, or limiting the decision process.
  4. Enhance legitimacy and expertise. Managers can exert the greatest influence in areas in which they have recognized legitimacy and expertise.
  5. Make a direct appeal. Political activity is effective only when goals and needs are made explicit. Managers should bargain aggressively and be persuasive.

Tactics for Enhancing Collaboration

(To reduce damaging conflicts)

  1. Create integration devices. (Labor-management teams are an integration device that increases worker participation and provides a cooperative model for union-management problems.)
  2. Use confrontation and negotiation. Confrontation occurs when parties in conflict directly engage one another and try to work out their differences. It is successful when managers with a positive attitude engage in a win-win strategy. Negotiation is the bargaining process that occurs during confrontation and that enables the parties to systematically reach a solution. Collective bargaining, resulting in an agreement specifying each party’s responsibilities for several years, is one type of negotiation to resolve a disagreement between workers and management.
  3. Schedule intergroup consultation. This process, sometimes called workplace mediation, is a strong intervention to reduce conflict because it brings the disputing parties together and allows each side to present its version of the situation.
  4. Practice member rotation. Rotation means that individuals from one department can be asked to work in another department on a temporary or permanent basis. Rotation works slowly to reduce conflict but is very effective for changing the underlying attitudes and perceptions that promote conflict.
  5. Create superordinate goals. When employees from different departments see that their goals are linked together, they will openly share resources and information.