Political Frame Paper - Essay Example

Rather than allowing the use of power to be destructive, the manager can learn to use power and politics as a skill to be developed within organizational arenas. The first assumption of the political frame perspective states that organizations are a compilation of competing interests and groups (coalitions) with conflict and tension inherent in conducting day-to-day business (Bolman & Deal, 2008). Because of limited resources it becomes necessary for the organizational members to vie for the rights to those resources.

There is no escaping the politics of the organization environment. For example, if a Danish center director and a regional marketing director are negotiating with a corporate client that needs French and English training within a month for four executives who are travelling internationally, but a competing center in Italy with the same regional marketing manager also has a need for the same resources for a different client, how would the company make the decision as to which client gets the resources first?

Who would take priority? If the regional director is Danish, would it be the Danish center director? From what can be found on the website, those decisions would follow the regional headquarters procedure, because the cultures found under that regional headquarters (in this case Denmark and Italy are both under Europe) are qualified to consider all interests equally (Berlitz, 2010) . Organizations form into coalitions that attempt to influence one another by pooling resources and power of the various members (Bolman & Deal, 2008; McShane & Von Glinow, 2005).

The Berlitz Worldwide Regional Directors can use a variety of influence methods to get what they want from one another. Influence tactics include: deferring to authority; assertiveness; information control; coalition formation; upward appeal; ingratiation and impression management; persuasion; and exchange (McShane & Von Glinow, 2005). There are factors to consider when utilizing an influence tactic such as upward, downward, or lateral influence, the influencer’s power base, and personal and cultural values.

These factors are the reasons why Berlitz is a particularly challenging organization to communicate within. There are a number of aspects to be considered that can be extremely diverse that can affect the power base, reactions, body language, response time, level of defensiveness to requests. Again, factoring all of these things takes time and in the fast-paced world we live in, the leader may not have the luxury of the time to work the issue as some might say and resort to “hard tactics” rather than “soft tactics” (p. 356). As a global organization each leader will have to consider the culture they are operating within and the culture of the coalition they are attempting to deal with or experience an exchange.

The second assumption within the political frame perspective is that the coalition members cannot ever shake their differences. No matter how much training, coaching, and peace keeping skills a leader/manager/diplomat may receive, that coalition member will continue to have persistent differences in attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, feelings, and activities (McShane & Von Gl