POWER AND POLITICS
WHAT IS POWER?
Power is the ability to
influence other people. It refers to the capacity to affect the behaviour of
the subordinate with the control of resources. It is an exchange relationship
that occurs in transactions between an agent and a target. The agent is the
person who uses the power and target is the receipt of the attempt to use
power.
MEANING OF POWER AND POLITICS:-
Power and
politics are very crucial for organizational behavioural actions of individuals
and groups. Individuals in organization use their power to satisfy their common
needs or get what they want. While Groups or organizations use power and
politics to control their members and employees for obtain and maintain to
achieve their goals. power and politics influence team processes and
organizational leadership in Organisational Behaviour. power and political in
organizational behavior can be unethical and destructive for any organization.
CONCEPT OF POWER AND POLITICS IN ORGANISATIONS:-
Power and politics in organizations are a reality
that no organization can ignore. Though the evolution of the modern corporation
and the concomitant rise of the managerial class with a professional way of
running the firms is touted to be one of the contributory factors for the
decline on power politics in organizations, one cannot just simply say that
there are no power centers or people with vested interests even in the most
professionally run and managed firms. The reason for this is that power
and politics are as old as human nature and recorded history and hence, one
cannot simply wish away the primal urge to resist those in power and in turn,
try an impose the will by those in power. This is the interplay of forces
within organizations wherein the top management and the senior leadership often
tries to have it their way whereas those in the middle and those who have been
passed over for promotion as CEOs and other C level positions try to resist
such power moves.
CHARACTERISTICS OF POWER:-
Definitions
of power are related to the concepts of authority and influence. Chester
Barnard defined power as “informal authority”. Many modern organisational
sociologists define authority as “legitimate power”. To have better
understanding of power, we bring out clearly the distinctions between power and
authority and power and influence.
Power
– Authority Distinctions
From the
preceding discussion, it is clear that a person who possesses power has the
ability to manipulate or influence others. Authority legitimizes and is a
source of power in the organisation. In contrast, power need not be legitimate.
Distinction can be made between top-down classical, bureaucratic authority and
Barnard’s acceptance theory of authority. To him, authority is “the character
of a communication (order) in a formal organisation by virtue of which it is
accepted by a member of the organisation as governing the action he
contributes”. Power is different from such acceptance theory of the authority
in the words of Grimes who notes: “what legitimizes authority is the promotion
of pursuit of collective goals that are associated with group consensus”.
Power- Influence
Distinction
Influence
is broader than power in its scope. It is a process of affecting the potential
behaviour of others. Power is the capacity of influence. Thus, authority is
different from power because of former’s legitimacy and acceptance, and
influence, though broader than power, is closer to it conceptually. Hence, both
are interchangeably used.
TYPES OF POWER:-
1.Economic power:
Economic power is the basis
of all power, including political power. It is based upon an objective
relationship to the modes of production, a group’s condition in the labour
market, and its chances. Economic power refers to the measurement of the
ability to control events by virtue of material advantage.
2.Social power:
It is
based upon informal community opinion, family position, honour, prestige and
patterns of consumption and lifestyles. Weber placed special emphasis on the
importance of social power, which often takes priority over economic interests.
Contemporary sociologists have also given importance to social status so much
so that they sometimes seem to have underestimated the importance of political
power.
3.Political power:
It is
based upon the relationships to the legal structure, party affiliation and
extensive bureaucracy. Political power is institutionalized in the form of
large-scale government bureaucracies. One of the persistent ideas has been that
they are controlled by elites, that is, small, select, privileged groups. Political power concerns the activities of the states
which is not confined to national boundaries. The networks of political power
can stretch across countries and across the globe. Political power involves the
power to tax and power to distribute resources to the citizens.
SOURCE OF POWER:-
There are three basic sources of power: force, influence and
authority.
Force:
As defined
earlier, force is the actual (physical force) or threatened (latent force) use
of coercion to impose one’s will on others. When leaders imprison or even
execute political dissidents, they thus apply force. Often, however, sheer
force accomplishes little. Although people can be physically restrained, they
cannot be made to perform complicated tasks by force alone.
Influence:
It refers
to the exercise of power through the process of persuasion. It is the ability
to affect the decisions and actions of others. A citizen may change his or her
position after listening a stirring speech at a rally by a political leader.
This is an example of influence that how the efforts to persuade people can
help in changing one’s opinion.
Authority:
It refers
to power that has been institutionalized and is recognized by the people over
whom it is exercised (Schaefer and Lamm, 1992). It is established to make
decisions and order the actions of others. It is a form of legitimate power.
Legitimacy means that those subject to a government’s authority consent to it
(Giddens, 1997).
The people
give to the ruler the authority to rule, and they obey willingly without the
threat of force. We tend to obey the orders of police officer because we accept
their right to have power over us in certain situations. Legitimate power is
accepted as being rightfully exercised (for example, power of the king). Thus,
sociologists distinguish power from authority.
Authority
is an agreed-upon legitimate relationship of domination and subjugation. For
example, when a decision is made through legitimate, recognized channels of government,
the carrying out of that decision falls within the realm of authority. In
brief, power is decision-making and authority is the right to make decisions,
that is, legitimate power.
ETHICS OF POWER AND POLITICS:-
No discussion on power and politics is complete without a
reference to the related ethical issues.
We
can begin this task by distinguishing between the political and the
non-political in its use when it remains within the boundaries of formal
authority, organizational policies and procedure, and job descriptions, and
when it is directed towards ends sanctioned by the organization.
When
the use of power moves outside the realm of authority, policies, procedures,
and job descriptions, or is directed towards ends not sanctioned by the
organization, the use of power is political.
Ethical
issues emerge when the use of power stretches into the realm of political
behavior. It is in this context that a manager must stop and seriously consider
the ethical issues involved in every action.
The
attitude that “ends justify the means” is not desirable. A person’s behavior
must satisfy three criteria if it were to be ethical. These are:
1.
Criterion
of utilitarian outcomes
The behavior results in optimization
of satisfaction of people inside and outside the organization, that is, it
produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
2.
Criterion
of individual rights
The behavior respects the rules of justice, that is, it treats people equitably and fairly as opposed to, arbitrary.
3.
Criterion,
of distributive justice
The behavior respects the rules of
justice, that is, it treats people equitably and fairly as opposed to,
arbitrarily.
It
may be stated that behavior may fail to satisfy the three criteria but can
still be considered ethical in the given situation. This special case must
satisfy the criterion of overwhelming factors, a criterion that justifies a
failure to satisfy one or more of the prior criteria of ethical political
behavior.
This
justification, however, must be based on truly overwhelming factors in which
the special nature of the situation results in-
1.
Conflict among criteria (e.g., a
behavior results in some good and some bad being done).
2.
Conflicts within criteria (e.g., a
behavior uses questionable means to achieve a positive end).
3.
Incapacity to employ the criteria
(e.g., a person’s behavior is based on inaccurate or incomplete information).
Use
of these four criteria can add vigor to the analysis of the ethics of political
behavior in organizations. All managers use power and politics to get their
work done.
Thus,
every manager bears a responsibility to do so in an ethical and socially
responsible fashion. By recognizing and confronting ethical considerations such
as those just discussed, each of us should be better prepared to meet this
important challenge.
THANK YOU
