Organizational Survival - Essay Example

Running head: organizational survival Organizational survival five "soft" and four "hard" influence tactics, and summarize Cialdini's Principles of Influence and Persuasion. Five soft influence tactics include rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, consultation, ingratiation, and personal appeals. These tactics are friendly and less forceful. The four hard tactics include exchange, coalition, pressure, and legitimating tactics. These tactics are forceful and create compelling situations. Cialdini’s six principles of influence and persuasion include reciprocation, social proof, commitment and consistency, liking, authority, and scarcity.

By reciprocation, Cialdini proposes that people tend to feel indebted to anything that they receive like information, gift, samples etc and in turn reciprocate with something in return. Secondly, social proof refers to people referring to others or other things to comply with a specific act or activity. Third principle of commitment and consistency refers to people’s enhanced willingness to comply with an act after having committed to it in verbal or written form. People prefer to be consistent with their attitudes, values and actions.

Liking refers to people’s preference to accept something that they already know or like based on physical appearance, similar to themselves, or compliments they receive. Authority refers to people’s affiliation towards respecting individuals in authority or power or at least show authority. Last principle of scarcity refers to scarcity of the item or service; people are drawn more towards items or services that are scarce. Identify and briefly describe French and Raven's Five Bases of Power, describe the term empowerment, and explain how to make it succeed.

French and Raven’s five bases of power are reward power, which complies with rewarding others with money, benefits, appreciation, recognition, career etc. Coercive power refers to punishing someone for doing something unethical; this basically refers to making someone do something against their will. Legitimate power refers to formal authority gained by virtue of the role, and accompanied by coercive power. Expert power is the power gained from knowledge and skills. Referent power is the power gained from other people’s liking towards specific individuals.

Empowerment is the process of sharing power and decision making with subordinates. This process enhances subordinates’ motivation levels. Empowerment can be made successful by sharing critical information with identified subordinates. Further modifying the structure of hierarchy and power that fosters autonomous decision making and actions can be very helpful. Subordinates can be given controlling power to manage the work. For these to be successful, individuals must have clarity of reasons, their roles, appropriate skills and trust in the leadership.

Define organizational politics, explain what triggers it, and specify the Three Levels of Political Action in Organizations. Organizational politics may be defined as intentional acts of influence to enhance or protect the self-interests of individuals or groups (Kinicki & Kreitner, 2009; p.335). Most of the organizational politics are triggered by uncertainty sourced by unclear objectives, vague performance measures, ill-defined decision processes, strong individual or group competition and organizational change.

The three levels of political action in organizations include individual, coalition, and network levels. At individual levels, individual pursuits of self interests trigger politics. At coalition level, cooperative pursuits of group interests in specific issues are the cause and these are informal, temporary, and single-issue alliances. At the network level, loose associations of individuals seeking social support for their general interests triggers politicking events. Distinguish between favorable and unfavorable impression management tactics.

Favorable impression management tactics involve creation of situations or engaging in activities that enhance chances of achieving the desired outcomes. For example, such tactics include manipulating information about job performance, dressing well, praising or doing favors for the boss, being nice and well dressed etc. Unfavorable impression management tactics include decreasing performance, not working to potential, withdrawing, displaying a bad attitude, and broadcasting one’s limitations; all these tactics are indicative of low motivation, indifference and low commitment. . References Kinicki, A and Kreitner, R. (2009). Organizational Behavior: key concepts, skills and best practices.

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