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LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY ACADEMIC ACTIVITY NO_2

Institute of ______Management_________________________________Department of ___Management Name of the faculty member____Ms. Deepali Sharma Course No.___MGT512__ Course Title__Management Practices and Organisational Behaviour. Class ______________MBA

Section ___RT1903__ Batch__2009

Max. Marks _25__ Date of Allotment_08.09.09, Date of Submission___01.12.09 PRESENTED BY ABHIMANYU SHARMA 1.

Roll no. RT1903B71

INTRODUCTION:

“THE ROLE OF POWER AND POLITICS IN MANAGEMENT” Traditionally, the term "management" refers to the activities (and often the group of people) involved in the four general functions: planning, organizing, leading and coordinating of resources. Note that the four functions recur throughout the organization and are highly integrated. Emerging trends in management include assertions that leading is different than managing, and that the nature of how the four functions are carried out must change to accommodate a "new paradigm" in management. This topic in the library helps the reader accomplish broad understanding of management (including traditional and emerging views), and the areas of knowledge and skills required to carry out the major functions of management. The Role of Management If you are a manager of a health program or service, your key responsibility will be to prepare for and implement the quality improvement process. Before and during the quality improvement process, you will need to ensure that there is a supportive environment for this work. To create this kind of environment, you might consider two issues: management style and participatory management activities. Managers who initiate a quality improvement process must incorporate several basic principles into their management style: •

A firm commitment to and support for quality

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A concern for the satisfaction of staff and users of health services

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A focus on problem solving to improve quality

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Respect for staff and their abilities

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A willingness to collect and use data to determine the nature and size of problems and to improve processes

we will also need to develop strategies for the organization, continually motivate people to support this process, and market change within the organization. Developing Strategies: Good management involves long-term or strategic planning. Without a clear idea of the organization's goals, employees don't know where the organization is going, or the best means to achieve the goals. An institution needs to define where it's going (the vision), why it's going there (the mission), and how to get there (the strategies). It will then be easier to use this process to work cohesively towards organizational goals. Tools in this section for helping you develop a coherent strategy for your organization include the affinity technique, force field analysis, SWOT analysis, and strategic analysis. Marketing Change: Quality improvement is about continued readiness to make changes towards improvement. However, every change of attitude or practice implies advantages and disadvantages. For people to accept a change, the advantages always have to be greater than the disadvantages. To promote the idea of change, you need to market its advantages. Tools in this section that will help you market change include developing a marketing plan, stakeholder analysis, and negotiation techniques. Motivating People: Motivating people to perform to the best of their capabilities and in the best interests of the organization is a huge task. Important elements in motivating people include leadership, clear organizational and individual goals, rewards based on performance of staff, and participatory supervision. Techniques included in this section that will help you motivate your staff include developing a supervision visit plan, effective meeting management, and techniques for solving conflicts. Developing Strategies Why? A strategy is necessary for every institution that wishes to achieve its goals, or for successfully completing a specific project. You can use a strategy to increase the probability of a project's success and to overcome resistance to change. What? The strategy defines the long-term lines of action that the institution will take to achieve its goals. It is built on two different elements:

1. Vision: the desired future of the institution, integrating the needs of both staff and users. 2. Mission: justifies the existence of the institution in the eyes of the users. The mission

explains the scope and goals of the institution's services to its users.

How? When developing a strategic plan, you must first identify the need and the demand for services, and then determine how to meet them. •

Define the vision and the mission of the institution according to internal and external users using the affinity technique.

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Identify and analyze the Strengths and Weaknesses of the institution as well as the external Opportunities and Threats to develop the strategy. You can do this by using the force field technique or the SWOT analysis.

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A strategic plan must be designed that systematizes the various steps to achieve the mission and reach the vision, taking into account the forces that promote and impede reaching the goal. Brainstorming will help generate four or five lines of action, spanning several years. These strategies should be fine-tuned by analyzing their technical, economic, and political viability.

What is power? Power is the ability to … Get someone to do something you want done. Make things happen in the way you want. Influence is …What you have when you exercise power. Expressed by others’ behavioral response to your exercise of power. How do managers acquire the power needed for leadership? ➢ Acquiring and using power and influence. A considerable portion of any manager’s time is directed toward power-oriented behavior. –

Power-oriented behavior is action directed at developing or using relationships in which other people are willing to defer wholly or partially to one’s wishes.

What are organizational politics?

Machiavellian tradition of organizational politics. –

Emphasizes self-interest and the use of nonsanctioned means.

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Organizational politics is defined as the management of influence to obtain ends not sanctioned by the organization or to obtain sanctioned ends through nonsanctioned influence means.

1. LITERATURE REVIEW: Power and Politics in Management By Jeffrey K. Pinto Politics: the process whereby attempts are made to achieve goals through accommodation and the exercise of influence.

Positions regarding political behavior: •

Naïve—view politics as unappealing; make resolution never to engage in any type of behavior that resembles political activity.

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Shark—have the express purpose of using politics and aggressive manipulation to reach the top; loyalty is entirely to themselves and their own objectives.

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Political Sensible—know that politics is simply another side of the behavior one must engage in order to succeed in modern organizations; do not play politics of a predatory nature; use politics as a way of making contacts, cutting deals, and gaining power and resources for their departments or projects to further corporate, rather than entirely personal, ends.

Core Concepts of Organizational Behavior: Chapter 15:

What are organizational politics? Alternate tradition of organizational politics. –

Politics is a necessary function resulting from differences in the self-interests of individuals.

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Politics is the art of creative compromise among competing interests.

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Politics is the use of power to develop socially acceptable ends and means that balance individual and collective interests.

Machiavellian tradition of organizational politics. Emphasizes self-interest and the use of nonsanctioned means.

Organizational politics is defined as the management of influence to obtain ends not sanctioned by the organization or to obtain sanctioned ends through nonsanctioned influence means.

1. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: The given topic is quite interesting to analyze and research upon. The faculty, seniors and our peers have been quite complementary and supportive in the research for the above given topic of research. The internet has been an enormous resource of information and data collection. The collection of data along with the constant guidance from faculty could make this work of research possible and existing in its present form.

2. PROJECT WORK: Power and Politics in Organizations: Public and Private: Joseph LaPalombara Organizational learning derives most of its knowledge from research on organizations in the private sector, particularly from the study of the firm. Its rich interdisciplinary quality is reflected in the range of social sciences that have contributed to the field’s robust development. The contribution from political science, however, has been minimal (reasons are suggested in the chapter on ‘politics’ by LaPalombara in this volume). The mutual failure of political scientists to pay more systematic attention to organizational learning and of organizational learning specialists to extend their inquiries into the public/political sphere is unfortunate in at least three senses. First, a general theory of organizational learning is unlikely to emerge unless and until what is claimed to be known about this phenomenon is shown to be the case (or not) in the public/political sphere as well. Second, sufficient evidence in political science—even if not gathered with organizational learning as the central focus—sho Power and Organizations The Role and Anatomy of Power Struggles Power, and the struggle over it, describe the essence of the political process. Rothman and Friedman (in this volume) note that scholars writing on organizational learning rarely take conflict and conflict resolution into consideration. They add that organizational conflict, even in the hands of authors as skilled as March and Olsen (1976), is not mentioned as one

of the factors that may inhibit the successful development of a learning cycle (see also March 1966). This neglect stems in part from the tendency, widespread in both the corporate community and management literature, to consider conflict itself as something highly undesirable and potentially pathological and, therefore, as something to be defeated (Hardy and Clegg 1996: 627–8; Pfeffer 1981: 2–9). It cannot be without negative consequences, either for the theory of organizational learning or for attempts to apply it in the workplace, that such organizations are almost never studied from the vantage point of power and of the competition that takes place to create and maintain control of it or wrest it from others (Berthoin Antal 1998; Dierkes 1988; Hardy and Clegg 1996: 631). One author (Kotter 1979: 2) noted that the open seeking of power is widely considered a sign of bad management. Indeed, the authors of management literature not only skirt the behavior associated with power struggles but also condemn it as ‘politicking’, which is seen as parochial, selfish, divisive, and illegitimate (Hardy and Clegg 1996: 629). Kotter (1979) found, for example, that in 2,000 articles published by the Harvard Business Review over a twenty-year period, only 5 of them included the word ‘power’ in their titles. This finding is astounding. It suggests that power is treated like a dirty little family secret: Everyone knows it’s there, but no one dares come right out to discuss it. One might imagine, though incorrectly, that the situation has changed for the better in recent decades. An examination of the Harvard Business Review with Kotter’s same question in mind shows that only 12 of more than 6,500 articles published in the period from 1975 to mid-1999 contained the word ‘power’ in their titles and that 3 contained the word ‘conflict’. ‘Leadership’ appeared in nine titles. In a sample of abstracts of these articles, one finds, as expected, the term ‘power’ somewhat more often than in the article’s titles. But the term is almost never treated as a central concept that orients the way the researcher looks at an organization or develops propositions about its internal life. This finicky, keep-it-in-the-closet attitude toward power is puzzling. For political scientists, the question of power in organizations is central for many reasons: because power is held unequally by its members, because there is a continuous struggle to change its distribution, because these inequalities and efforts to change them inevitably lead to internal tensions. A persistent quest in political science, therefore, is to illuminate the structural aspects of public/political management that permits those involved to confront and handle power confrontations without defeating the purpose of the organization itself. Was those organizations in the public/political sector do differ in significant ways from those in the private sphere? And third, considerations of power and its exercise are so ubiquitous in public/political-sector organizations, indeed they are so central to an understanding of these bodies, that one wonders why such meager attention has been paid to this concept in the literature on organizational theory and organizational learning.

Is There a Power Struggle? The puzzle of inattention to power in the fields of organizational theory and organizational learning is all the more intriguing given that leading organizational theorists, such as Argyris and Schön (1978, 1996) and Perrow (1972), have certainly addressed this matter. For example, Perrow treated organizational traits such as nepotism and particularism as means by which leaders of economic and noneconomic organizations maintain their power within them. Because these organizations are the tools of those who lead them and can be used to accumulate vast resources, a power struggle typically occurs over their control (pp. 14–17). And because of goal displacement that may accompany such power struggles, organizations may well become ‘things-in-themselves’ (pp. 188–9). It is possible that leading theorists such as Argyris and Schön (1978, 1996) and Senge (1990) have themselves been excessively reticent in treating phenomena such as power struggles within the firm (Coopey 1995). It may be that corporate managers are in denial and therefore loathe to acknowledge that even they, like their counterparts in politics, are playing power games. Firms, and the literature about them, stress the beauty of teamwork and team players. Plants are organized around work teams and quality circles. Mission statements are endlessly reiterated. Human resource managers expend enormous energy instilling the firm’s culture as a distinctive way of doing things. People who excel at the approved traits are rewarded with promotions and stock options. All these practices might be cited as evidence that corporate behavior is instrumentally rational and that the search for power, especially for its own sake, is alien to the firm. This way of thinking and describing things leaves little room for attention to the power games that lie at the center of most organizational life. Thus, making decisions about corporate strategic plans and the budgetary allocations that go with them; defining of core businesses and the shedding of what is not ‘core’; effecting mergers, acquisitions, and alliances; and carrying out radical corporate restructuring that may separate thousands of persons from their jobs and yet dazzlingly reward others would typically be seen by political scientists as behavior that is quite similar to the kind of power struggles that take place every day in public-sector organizations. Behind the veil of corporate myth and rhetoric, managers obviously know about this aspect of their environment as well. So do writers for the financial newspapers, where words such as ‘power struggle’ appear much more frequently than they do in the management journals. How could it be otherwise when the efforts at leveraged buyouts, struggles to introduce one product line and abolish others, and differences over where and how best to invest abroad take on the monumental dimensions reported in the press? It would be astonishing if the persons involved in these events were found to actually believe that considerations of personal and organizational power are not germane to them. Nevertheless, as Hardy and Clegg (1996) noted, ‘the hidden ways in which senior managers

use power behind the scenes to further their position by shaping legitimacy, values technology and information are conveniently excluded from analysis. This narrow definition obscures the true workings of power and depoliticizes organizational life’ (p. 629). Attempts to correct the queasy orientation to the reality of conflict and power struggles have been relatively rare. One reason is that not just the actors in the corporate community but also students of such things come to believe in the mythologies about empowered employees, concern for the stakeholders, the rationality of managerial decisions, and the pathology of power-seeking within organizations. Their belief is a pity in that, without doubt, the structure of power, explicit or implied rules about its use, and the norms that attach to overt and covert power-seeking will deeply affect the capacity of the organization to learn (Coopey 1995). In any case, there can be no doubting the fact, however much it may continue to be obscured in the corridors of corporate power, that struggles of this kind deeply affect corporate life its external behavior; and who gets what, when, and how within these institutions (Coopey 1995: 202–5). The Benefits of Power Struggle Power struggle, of course, is not the only aspect of organizations worth study, and the world of politics is not just Hobbesian in nature. Cooperation is the obverse of conflict. How power is defined and whether the definition reflects left-wing or right-wing bias makes a difference in thinking about or conceptualizing the salience of power in organizations (Hardy and Clegg 1996: 623–5). In particular, it is essential that one avoid any definition or relatively broad conceptualization that does not take into account that, in any organization the existing ‘rules of the game’ even if they are considered highly rational and ‘legitimate’, constitute in themselves the outcome of an earlier (and typically ongoing) struggle over control of an organization’s resources (Hardy and Clegg 1996: 629). When the ubiquitous existence of power struggle within organizations is acknowledged and put into proper perspective, when power-seeking (even when the impulse is entirely egocentered and not driven by organizational needs) is accepted as normal behavior, and when it is recognized that no existing organizational structure is entirely neutral, only then can one hope to clarify what kind of single-loop or double-loop learning is likely to occur. For example, Coopey (1995) argued, correctly in my view, that where the distribution of power within an organization is hierarchical and asymmetrical, the type of organizational learning that proceeds in such contexts will tend to buttress the status quo. Their reasoning makes sense not just because, for example, the learning process tends to favor senior managers but also because the kind and quality of information to which those managers have access becomes, in itself, an instrument for exercising and preserving one’s favorable position in the power hierarchy. In the public sector, double-loop learning is even more impeded and therefore rarer than in the private sphere. The reason is that politics, in both the organizational environment and

political organizations, actually infuses every aspect of what public-sector organizations are and what they do. The more important the sphere of action or the issues treated by these bodies and the more public attention they draw, the more difficult it will be to reach consensus. And once consensus is reached, the more improbable it will be that anyone will either want to modify it or succeed in doing so—no matter what the feedback about the policies and their efficacy may turn out to be (Smith and Deering 1984: 263–70). Double-loop learning in the public sphere is impeded also by the formal separation of policy-making and policy implementation, as for example between legislative and administrative bodies. As noted earlier, policies are infrequently the choices of the organizations called on to implement them. In this setting, endemic to governmental systems, certain types of impediments to organizational learning tend to materialize. On the principal’s side, there may not be sufficient time, or technical competence, or interest to learn what is actually going on with policy implementation. The probability is low, therefore, that those who make policy and set organizational goals will ever get information that might encourage a realistic articulation of goals and a rational specification of the means to be used in goal achievement. Organized interest groups are well aware of this gap. As a consequence, their typical strategy is to keep fighting for what they want, not only when alternative policies are up for consideration but also (sometimes particularly) after an unwanted policy has formally been adopted but must still face the vagaries of being carried out. On the agent’s side, whatever is learned about policy implementation that might urge a change of methods or of the policy itself may never be articulated at all, for to do so might upset an existing political equilibrium. Not only are these equilibria difficult to obtain in the first place, they often also involve an unspoken, symbiotic relationship—often dubbed the ‘Iron Triangle’ (e.g. Heclo 1978: 102)—between a specialized legislative committee, a bureaucratic agency responsible for administering the specialized policies, and the organized interests that benefit from particular policies, particular ways of implementing these policies, or both. Potential learning that would upset this balance of forces finds very rough sledding. The treatment of whistle-blowers, who sometimes go public with revelations of misguided or distorted policies or of bad methods used in their administration, is eloquent evidence of this problem. One way to overcome the stasis implied by these tendencies is to encourage power struggles, not to obscure them (Lindblom 1971: 21–42, 64–7). Nothing will galvanize the attention of politicians and bureaucrats more than learning that organized groups with a vested interest in a given policy and large numbers of faithful voters are unhappy about a particular aspect of public policy. When these groups lie outside the Iron Triangle, they are far less inhibited by considerations of equilibria then when they are inside it. This singleissue focus is indeed one of the reasons why even small and not well-financed public advocacy groups can sometimes be very effective in bringing about change (Heclo 1978).

The trick is to maximize transparency, to encourage more group intervention as well as prompt the media to provide more, and more responsible, investigative reporting than they usually offer. Today it appears that the Internet is quickly becoming an important instrument for the timely, accurate, and detailed exposure, now on a global scale, of conditions that require correction. The organizational learning implications of this development are potentially enormous. Increased transparency implies, if nothing else, a more democratic, capillary diffusion and sharing of information (see also Friedman, Lipshitz, and Overmeer in this volume). In an organizational context, whether in the private or the public sphere, this fact alone modifies the form, quality, and spread of learning; it also brings about a modification of the organizational power structure itself.

Ten political tools: 1. Gaining support from a higher power source or sources • Sponsorship • Lobbying • Co-optation 2. Alliance or coalition building • IOUs • Deals • Establish common cause • Mutual support or defences 1. Controlling a critical resource • Money • People • Information • Expertise 1. Controlling the decision process • Control “short list” • Control decision criteria 1. Controlling the committee process • Agenda • Membership • Minutes • Pre-agenda negotiations • Chairmanship 1. Use of positional authority • Rewards

1. 1.

1. 1.

• Coercion Use of the scientific element • Planning • Control Deceit and deception • Secrecy • Surprise • Hidden agendas • Hidden objectives • Two faces • All things to all people Information • Censoring or withholding • Distortion Miscellaneous games • Divide and rule • Whistle blowing • In the same lifeboat

1. FINDINGS/ CONCLUSIONS:

impact of power on organization

All existing organizations try to generate the maximum profit through its activities. In order to do so, organizations look for achieving internal effectiveness. There are several factors that can influence the effectiveness of the organization. These factors include culture, motivation, communication, power, design, and other factors. In this paper, I will focus on the effects of power, authority, and politics on effectiveness of the organization.The paper will be divided in two main parts, the first part will deal with power, authority, and political behavior; their definitions, sources, and functions. In the second part, I will give the impact of power on the organization, how the political behavior is considered as stress and job aggression impetus, how power leads to effectiveness, and how power is viewed in a Moroccan organization. Power has many definitions depending on the concept in which the term is involved. It can be considered as the ability to act with force, or the ability to influence others to believe, behave, or to value as those in power desires them to or to strengthen, validate, or confirm present beliefs, behaviors, or values. Also power can be considered as the capaci

In addition, employees were always referring to the supervisor when faced with a problem, they try to learn from him. Finally, by giving up some of the authority one can enforce it indirectly and motivate his/her workers. First, it serves as a reduction factor of human variability inside organization. One way to identify a person with this type power is to find others imitating his characteristics. The power can be used also as motivator for employees to get the job done at specific time and details of production. NB: The questions asked in the organization were informal in order for the General director to not misunderstand my situation, and think that I am a member of a labor union. The third function of authority is that it outlives people who have it. Another limitation of authority is that authority is used always in a descendent way, which means that is applied only on subordinates. In order to understand the use of power in this organization, let us see the major functions of each person within the organization:General Director: Negotiate contracts with clients;- Set the strategies and objectives of the company;- Control the flow of the work in the organization;- Direct the purchases of the company;- All financial tasks. So one of the purposes of authority is to be used in equilibrium. Generally, organizations that use this type of power exert a high level of control and supervision, reduction in salaries, time worked not paid, and can go to fire the employee. Resources as power: Resources are very important in an organizational setting. For an individual to understand better the internal environment of an organization, he has to assess where power is concentrated, and where is the most powerful body in the organization. He has to do so for the sake of identifying his position in the hierarchy and to know how to behave with each person in the organization. These organizational structures tend to exist in developing countries.

2. LIMITATIONS: The following were the limitations faced while conducting this research work: 1. The soft copy of the research work was to be prepare rather than handwritten . 2. No computer available at home . 3. No internet connection available at home. 4. Time available is only two month.

3. BIBLIOGRAPHY & REFERENCES : www.oppapers.com J. (1995). ‘The Learning Organization: Power, Politics, and Ideology’. Management Learning, 26: 193–213. Pfeffer, J. (1981). Power in Organizations. Marshfield, MA: Pittman.