Organizational Politics - Dissertation Example

Managers engage in enhancing their abilities and capabilities to use power and participate in political activities.  In the process, they attempt to exercise coercion and control over their subordinates. This naturally gives rise to resistance which takes the shape of conflicts.

However, according to Max Weber, organizations can achieve the coordination necessary for rational, logical, and calculable action only through impersonal coercion and discipline of subordinates and clients (McNeill, 1978, p65). Pfeffer (1992, p10) contends that power and influence are social realities and in trying to ignore them, organizations lose a chance to understand these critical social processes and to train managers to cope with them.

However, power has been associated with such a negative interpretation that people keep away from it for fear of getting a bad name. Politics, in general, is also related to negative outcomes; politics is considered to be inherently non-rational and subject to power interactions between diverse interests (Kinicki, 2008) but Vigoda (2000, p1) found a weak negative relationship between perception of organizational politics and employees’ performance.

Political agendas have become central to success in managing change, according to Butcher and Clarke (1999, p1) and Baddeley and James (1987, p1) also consider political skill as a demanding ingredient of success and survival for the organization. Varman and Bhatnagar (1999, p349) explain the importance of political behavior in addressing grievances while Sheard, Kakabadse, and Kakabadse (2011, p78) highlight how political behavior takes leadership action to accomplish goals. Allen et al (1978, p78) emphasize that managers must know of the political processes and elaborate on the proactive and reactive behavior of the managers.

Lee (1987, p316) identifies sources of power as a coalition, expertise, information, rewards, emotional ties, authority, and coercion while Varman and Bhatnagar add formal authority, rules and regulations, knowledge, and information, counter organizations and informal organizations. However, a person’s actual power is a function of the sources, importance, and scarcity of the power available to them (Lee, 1987, p317). Farrell and Peterson (1982, p403) examine individual political behavior within an organization, which they feel has been neglected.

Fleming and Spicer (2008, p302) propose that power and resistance in an organization are intertwined. Bureaucratic power is used to exercise control and this gives rise to conflicts in the organization.