BUS603: Managing People

THE CONCEPTS OF POWER AND ORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS John Gardner, writing about leadership and power in organizations, notes, "Of course leaders are preoccupied with power! The significant questions are: What means do they use to gain it? How much do they exercise it?" To what ends do they exercise it? He further states, "Power is the basic energy needed to initiate and sustain action or, to put it another way, the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it". In a similar vein, Richard Nixon wrote, "The great leader needs... the capacity to achieve.... Power is the opportunity to build, to create, to nudge history in a different direction". Dahl writing about the pervasiveness of the concept of power states, "The concept of power is as ancient and ubiquitous as any that social theory can boast". He defined power "as a relation among social actors in which one actor A, can get another social actor B, to do something that B would not otherwise have done". Hence, power is recognized as "the ability of those who possess power to bring about the outcomes they desire".

The concept of organizational politics can be linked to Harold Lasswell's (1936) definition of politics as who gets what, when and how. If power involves the employment of stored influence by which events, ac- tions and behaviors are affected, then politics involves the exercise of power to get something done, as well as to enhance and protect the vested interests of individuals or groups. Thus, the use of organizational politics suggests that political activity is used to overcome resistance and implies a conscious effort to organize activity to challenge opposition in a priority decision situation. The preceding discussion indicates that the concepts of power and organizational politics are related. Thus, in this chapter, we define organizational politics as the use of power, with power viewed as a source of potential energy to manage relationships.

THE POLITICAL FRAME As discussed earlier, Bolman and Deal describe four "frames" for viewing the world: structural, human resources, political, and symbolic. The political frame is an excellent tool for examining the concept of organizational politics and makes a number of assumptions about organizations and what motivates both their actions and the actions of their decision makers.

• Organizations are coalitions of individuals and interest groups, which form because the members need each others' support. Through a negotiation process, members combine forces to produce common objectives and agreed upon ways to utilize resources thus aggregating their power. Power bases are developed that can accomplish more than individual forces alone.
• There are enduring differences among individuals and groups in values, preferences, beliefs, information, and perception of reality. Such differences change slowly, if at all.
• Most of the important decisions in organizations involve allocation of scarce resources: they are decisions about who gets what. Scarcity exacerbates political behavior. In government at present, the competition is for personnel spaces and funding. Mission is the means to gain both, because resources tend to follow mission. For this reason, the Services compete for strategic mission (e.g., the omnipresent roles and missions debate), and thus make the job of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs more challenging. In the government as a whole, agencies compete for significance in the national/international picture, because significance means public approval and that means resources. (The two dominant political parties also attempt to present the American public with different views of what is significant).
• Because of scarce resources and enduring differences, conflict is central to organizational dynamics and power is the most important resource. Conflict is more likely in under-bounded systems (less regulation and control). In an over-bounded system with power concentrated at the top (e.g., pre-Glasnost Russia), politics remains, but underground. Jefferies makes the point that organizations play the political game within the broader governmental context, but those individuals also play politics within organizations. So both influences are at work. And power is key in both cases, because it confers the ability both to allocate resources- in itself a way to increase power-and to consolidate power by bringing others with similar goals and objectives into the inner decision making core.
• Organizational goals and decisions emerge from bargaining, negotiating, and jockeying for position among members of different coalitions. Bolman and Deal offer the space shuttle program as an example of a strategic effort backed by a complex coalition consisting of NASA, contractors, Congress, the White House, the military, the media, and even portions of the public. The difficulty in the Challenger disaster was that different members of the coalition were in disagreement about how to balance technical and political concerns. These became increasingly salient as the enormously expensive shuttle program encountered one delay after another for safety-related technical reasons. At the time of the Challenger shuttle disaster, both Thiokol and NASA were under increasing pressure to produce on schedule at programmed cost. The decision to launch on that fateful day was made when political forces overcame technical considerations. But, of course, this only illustrates the decision maker's difficulty in weighing one kind of consideration against another-subjective assessment of constituency demands versus rational data that may nonetheless lack substantiated cause-and-effect relationships with downside outcomes-under conditions of great time pressure.

The five propositions of the political frame do not attribute organizational politics to negative, dysfunctional or aggrandizing behavior. They assert that organization diversity, interdependence, resource scarcity, and power dynamics will inevitably generate political forces, regardless of the players. Organizational politics cannot be eliminated or fantasized away. Leaders, however, with a healthy power motive can learn to understand and manage political processes.

POWER AS A MOTIVE. Power is attractive because it confers the ability to influence decisions, about who gets what resources, what goals are pursued, what philosophy the organization adopts, what actions are taken, who succeeds and who fails. Power also gives a sense of control over outcomes, and may in fact convey such enhanced control. Particularly as decision issues become more complex and outcomes become more uncertain, power becomes more attractive as a tool for reducing uncertainty.

Power and the ability to use it are essential to effective leadership. Strategic leaders who are uncomfortable with either the presence of great power in others or its use by themselves are probably going to fail their organizations at some point. The critical issue is why the leader seeks power and how it is used. Some see power as a tool to enhance their ability to facilitate the work of their organizations and groups. Others value power for its own sake, and exercise power for the personal satisfaction it brings. There can be good and bad in both cases. However, the leader who uses power in the service of his/her organization is using power in the most constructive sense. The leader who seeks power for its own sake and for personal satisfaction is at a level of personal maturity that will compromise his/her ethical position, risk his/her organization's effectiveness, and perhaps even jeopardize the long-term viability of the organization.

Power competition exists at two levels. Individuals compete for power within agencies and organizations; agencies and organizations compete for power within the broader governmental context. The mechanics of power competition are much the same. In both cases, power accrues when an individual or an organization achieves control of a scarce commodity that others need. And in both cases, the operations are essentially political. Even when compelling physical force is the means, the mechanism is political. The scarce commodity is the means of inflicting harm on others. So dictators, by hook or by crook, gain a monopoly on the means for inflicting harm on others. During the course of the Cold War, the massive build-up of armaments was aimed at maintaining a "balance of forces" so as to prevent intimidation by either side. Even after Glasnost, the level of armaments on both sides was carefully negotiated so as to preclude imbalance that might tempt one side or the other toward risky moves.

Power competition within an organization or agency is generally for resources- personnel spaces or funding, or both, in governmental agencies. And the basis for the competition can be constructive as well as destructive. If the top-level leadership is wise and capable, the basis for competition can be defined as meritorious performance of either individual or group. In that case, performance becomes the basis for determining who accumulates power. The process is still political, but it is also constructive because the organization as a whole benefits.

So, the political process can be either destructive or constructive, depending on the resource to be accumulated, the means by which the competitors seek to accumulate it, and the value that accrues to all competitors by virtue of the competition. (Of course, competition based on performance, if conducted at such an extreme that human values or key norms governing competition are violated, may substantially hurt the organization in the long term).

However, internal politics can also be detrimental in ways not readily apparent. Sub-units within agencies may develop objectives and goals at odds with those of the agency. For example, a given "desk" owes its stature in its own agency to the constituency needs it serves. An extremely important constituency is the nation it represents within its own agency and with which it deals. The "desk" therefore may find it valuable to promote the needs of that constituency over the needs of the agency by "selling" important positions or programs that benefit the constituency-thereby unwittingly becoming co-opted and increasingly vulnerable to manipulation by that constituency.

Organizations also play a political game. Organizations seek influence. Influence increases autonomy (freedom to control own assets); organizational morale (the ability to maintain cohesion and effectiveness); essence (sanctity of essential tasks and functions); roles and missions (exclusion of options that would challenge these); and budgets (increased roles and missions will always favor larger budgets) (Jefferies).

To increase their own influence, agencies in government and other organizations will provide information, recommend options, and execute directives in ways that enhance their own self interest. Jefferies illustrates with the decision to send a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft to overfly the Cuban missile sites. The decision to send the U-2 was actually made 10 days before the flight occurred, but the implementation was delayed by the CIA-USAF struggle for the mission. The CIA defined the mission as intelligence gathering and advanced the argument that it had a better U-2 than did the USAF. The USAF was concerned that the pilot be in uniform to avoid repetition of the Gary Powers crisis if the aircraft was shot down. (The total mission delay came from five days to make the decision and five days to train an Air Force pilot to fly CIA U-2s).

Because key leaders who form the centralized circle at the top of the policy making apparatus have different viewpoints, particularly with something as uncertain as strategic policy, they are obligated to fight for what they consider right. Thus, decision making is not a unitary process, but also "a process of individuals in politics reacting to their own perceptions of national, organizational, and personal goals" (Jefferies 1992). Because the scope and scale are too great for one person to master, the president must persuade in order to develop the consensus required for broad support of decision outcomes. (Those who wind up executing must be product champions for these decisions, or they are not likely to implement them). The president is also open to persuasion, because the various branches or agencies may also build power bases outside government or outside the executive branch.

While our focus has been on establishing a legitimate context for understanding organizational politics, a countervailing view to the political frame is the rational frame of organizational decision making

THE RATIONAL FRAME. By definition, rational processes are different from political processes. Rational decisions rest heavily on analytic process. An analytic process can be defined as one in which there are agreed-upon methods for generating alternative solutions to problems, and for assigning values to the benefits and costs expected from each of the alternatives. And sophisticated computational methods are readily available for calculating benefits/costs ratios once these values are assigned. The essence of rational process is the belief that, "All good persons, given the same information, will come to the same conclusion". Those seeking to employ the rational process to the exclusion of political process thus seek open communication, perhaps through more than just formal (vertical) organizational channels.

The rapid expansion of electronic mail systems that permits anyone in an organization to address anyone else probably rests on a rationality premise-that transcending organizational channels by allowing all members to address directly even the highest official will give that official more complete information and thus enable higher quality decisions. This is very difficult for some people to understand especially those with narcissistic power needs and maturity issues. There is also a trust assumption: that members can be trusted not to abuse the privilege and that high officials will not misuse the information. A political process would view valuable information as a commodity to be traded for influence.

There is another important difference between rational and political views of appropriate operations both within and between organizations. The political frame does not depend on trust between persons. In the preceding example, both trust assumptions would be discounted as unrealistic. Trust in the probable future actions of coalition members is based on perception of gain to be expected from not violating agreements on which a coalition is based, for example. The intrinsic morality of being trustworthy is not particularly useful as a concept.

Trust probably is not particularly a part of the rational frame, either, except that a strong rationalist believes in and trusts the logic of the process by which information is converted into decision outcomes. So a strong rationalist will trust others to be similarly logical. This leads to important postulates about rational communication within a system. For a rationalist, systems are information-consuming engines. Particularly at the strategic level, the unimpeded flow of information is crucial to the health of the system as a whole. However, politics and power dynamics strongly influence communication processes. To the extent organizations and the people in them are motivated by political gain and power dynamics, rational processes are inevitably shortchanged.