MGT5313 Chap.10 Power, Influence and Politics
Power, Influence and Politics
The chapter every earlier chapter was describing
Power is the last organizational characteristic in the course framework and it has been present throughout. The reward system in the motivation chapter, the meeting design in the teams chapter and the change levers in the previous chapter are all distributions of power described in other vocabulary.
The course begins with property rights, defined as the rights an organization gives its members to receive and use its resources, and grades them: shareholders hold the strongest because they own the resources and share in the profits; top managers hold strong ones through large resource allocations, high salaries, stock options and the authority to decide; middle managers may hold job security, an ownership plan or profit sharing; frontline employees typically hold wages, health and pension benefits and control over their own tasks.
The difference between the top and the bottom is not only size but kind, which is why increasing frontline pay changes little about the distribution of power while giving a frontline team a budget it may allocate changes a great deal.
Power as a factor, not a residue
Much writing about organizations treats power as something regrettable that good cultures do without. The course material does not.
It states that vary the rights and you vary the culture, because rights set what a member expects of their own conduct and of what that conduct will return.
Power is one of the four things that builds a culture rather than a residue left over after it is built, and an organization that declines to describe its own distribution of power has not abolished the distribution.
Structure decides how visible power is
A mechanistic structure is tall, highly centralised and standardised, and it leaves an individual very little autonomy, and what it rewards is caution, deference to the authority above and respect for how things have been done.
An organic structure is flat and decentralised, relies on mutual adjustment, and gives people freedom to choose and control their activities so that creativity and risk taking become the desirable behaviours.
Both descriptions are about what an ambitious person learns to do, which is what makes structure a political fact rather than an administrative one: it teaches people what is rewarded before anybody tells them, and it does so more reliably than any values statement because the lesson arrives through experience.
Carriers a case analysis can actually observe
Organizations rarely publish their decision rights, so the analysis has to use what is emitted.
Office size and location signal whether the organization is hierarchical and status conscious, and the worked example in the material is deliberately physical: an executive suite isolated on a top floor, open only to top executives, reached by a private corridor, stairway and lift.
Forms of address and dress carry the same information, contrasting casual dress at one firm with the expensive, well cut clothing an investment bank expects. Who may spend, and on what, marks the real limit of a person's authority as against their title. Rites of enhancement show which contributions the organization chooses to make visible.
Each is weak alone, and together they support a defensible claim about the distribution that no organization chart would give you.
Politics as a routing problem
Politicised behaviour, with the spreading of rumours as its example, appears in the first chapter among the dysfunctional behaviours that detract from performance, alongside absenteeism, turnover, theft, harassment and rudeness.
Listing it as dysfunctional is correct and is not a diagnosis. The useful question is what conditions route a disagreement into that channel.
One practitioner reading contains a direct answer: an executive refereed a dispute between two department heads over a marketing plan, stopped them apologising for arguing and told them open conflict was exactly the right behaviour, because the alternative he was trying to prevent was back channel politics.
That is one person's account of his own conduct and so is not evidence that the approach works, but it is a clear illustration of a mechanism, which is that the relative cost of open disagreement and covert manoeuvring is set by what the senior person does when a disagreement surfaces.
Influence sits between the two: it names what a person achieves without being able to instruct anyone, it is the ordinary condition of work in a matrix, and it leaves fewer traces than either power or politics, so claims about it should be tied to something recorded.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Property rights as a graded system from shareholders to frontline staff
- 02
Why the top and bottom of that ladder differ in kind and not only in size
- 03
Power as one of the four factors that build a culture
- 04
Mechanistic and organic structures as political facts
- 05
Carriers of power an outsider can observe
- 06
Politicised behaviour on the published dysfunctional list
- 07
The relative price of open conflict and back channel manoeuvring
- 08
Influence, and why it is the hardest of the three to evidence
A flat structure that relocated its own hierarchy
- 3Say what removing the layers actually removed.
- 3Identify which factor was never touched.
- 2Explain why the newcomers are the diagnostic.
- 2Give the cheaper alternative to reinstating the layers.
Key terms
- Politicised Behaviour
- Behaviour such as spreading rumours, listed in the course material among the dysfunctional behaviours that detract from organizational performance.
- Back Channel Politics
- Settling a disagreement through third parties and timing rather than in front of the people affected, which leaves no record that anyone can later read.
- Decision Rights
- The published statement of which decisions sit with which role, what may be spent without asking, and who must be consulted. Its absence makes influence the only available route.
- Status Symbols
- Features such as office size and location that convey an organization's cultural values, signalling whether it is hierarchical and status conscious or informal and participative.
- Informal Standing
- Authority held through tenure, relationships or access rather than through a role, which survives the removal of formal layers and is invisible to newcomers.
- Matrix Structure
- An arrangement in which global groups, business sectors and functions collaborate across reporting lines, and in which responsibility routinely exceeds formal authority.
Power, Influence and Politics FAQ
Is organizational politics always a bad thing?
The course lists politicised behaviour such as spreading rumours among the dysfunctional behaviours, so the specific behaviour is treated as costly. What is not treated as a character flaw is the fact that disagreements get settled somewhere.
The productive question is what makes the open route expensive in a given organization, because that is a condition a manager can change, whereas describing a division as political is a label that suggests no action.
How do I analyse power in a company I can only observe from outside?
Use the carriers. Where the senior team sits and whether the space is shared, whether job advertisements state spending or hiring authority, what recognition communications celebrate, and how leaders and staff address each other in public material. Each is weak alone and the interesting result is whether they converge.
State the limit honestly: this evidences the signals the organization emits, and a firm can emit informal signals while operating a centralised reality.
Why does giving a team a budget matter more than giving it a pay rise?
Because the two touch different kinds of right. Pay is an entitlement and does not change who may direct the organization's resources; a budget a team may allocate does. The course material connects property rights to what people expect from their own actions, so the change that alters expectations is the one that hands over discretion rather than the one that increases an amount.
Assessment move
Write down the decision rights in any organization you know well: which decisions sit with whom, what a person may spend without asking, and who must be consulted. Most people find they cannot complete the list, and the gaps are precisely where influence is doing the work that a published rule would otherwise do. That exercise is the fastest route into the analysis section of a group project.
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