Power and Politics Flashcards
Main power categories
- Position power
- Personal power
Position power
- Legitimate power
- Reward Power
- Coercive power
Legitimate power
Formal legal authority that comes from a position
- Only relying on it won’t make you keep the power long
Zone of indifference
Legitimate power
Range the authoritative request with a subordinate is willing to respond without subjecting the directives to critical evaluation or judgement
Hierarchical thinking
- Occur when overuse of Legitimate power
- when hierarchical systems create environments of superiority amon managers and inferiority among employees
Reward power
- Control over resources
- Comes from the ability to give positive rewards and remove/decrease negative ones
Coercive Power
Using punishment when people don’t comply when others don’t comply with influence attempts
Expert power
- Part of personal power
- Comes from special skills and abilities that others need but do not possess themselves
- Relative not absolute
Referent power
- Ability to alter another’s behavior because of the individual’s desire to identify with the power source.
- identification -> source of referent power
Information power
- Possession of access to information that is valuable to others
- Can come from positional or personal
Connection power
Ability to call on connections outside and inside ORG
Association power
- From connection power
- Arises from influence from other person with a powerful person whom other depends
- Not what you know but who you know
Reciprocal Alliances
- From connection power
- Power arise from connections that others developed through reciprocity
Structural power
Power is opposite of dependence
Power is relative to relation we’re looking at
Countervailing power
If actors can coordinate their actions, they act more like one
Power of collective-action ( Free rider problem)
Once something private benefits to the mass (lighthouse) there’s no incentive for an individual to do it
Power
- Ability of a person to influence or control some aspect of a person or group
- Has to be given
Social power
- Comes from the ability to influence another in a social relation
- Can be taken away
Force
Power that occurs against one’s will
Dependence
- One person relies on another to get what they want
- Control over access to thing people need
Control
Authority to exercise restraining or dominating influence over someone.
Agenda-setting power
- Power to win a particular agreement
- Power over which arguments we have
Why do we have organizational politics
- Because informal and formal system
- Politics is the exercise of power through informal structure
Self-interested politics
People shifting otherwise ambiguous outcomes to their personal advantages
