The Management of Organizational Politics with Clients Discussion

I’m working on a psychology question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

 

Take a moment to reflect on what you have learned about influence, power, and politics. Using what you have learned, respond to the following prompt:

A client has asked for your advice to manage organizational politics. As an I/O psychologist, what advice would you give your client?

Welcome to this lecture on power, influence, and politics. Power. Power is the use of some aspect of work relationship to compel another to perform a certain action despite resistance. Let’s say that a different way.

Power is using your influence to drive some kind of action. It could be in the workplace. It could be in a home setting. But what we’re looking at in IO psychology is how does an individual on an employee use power to influence decisions.

This next thing is influence. So now we’re looking at factors. What are some of those factors? Well, one of them being social. The other is emotions or affect. And we’re looking at what are the components that we can leverage to help move and create action. And that’s the influence component.

That’s the momentum. That’s driving towards the direction. At the bottom, you’ll see organizational politics. And they could be both good and bad depending on how you use them. But our definition here highlights that it’s a self-serving action.

At the end of the day, that’s a good way to see it is typically, politics is driven on some kind of self-serving intention, self-serving action to get to a specific outcome or a specific behavior, something that we desire.

As we’re looking at the use of social influence, so we’re looking at control aspects, on your visual, you’ll see that there’s some component, for example, there’s a higher status. Someone higher up in the organization can have more influence, more power, and can drive decisions.

And so the people who are higher up and tend to rise in status will tend to use more assertive actions or assertive behaviors to drive others to make decisions or to take an action that is wanted by a specific person.

So that’s a way of using social control. Something else that could be used is coworkers or exchange or coalitions. So a coalition is a group of people driving towards a specific outcome. And so social control could also be pushed through the form of a coalition.

When we’re looking at personal goals, there could be that subordinates use upward appeal or rationality to drive influence through social control. So this aspect of driving through tactics like pressure, influencing others to do certain things.

And so that could be both in the form of a subordinate trying to push it up or a manager pushing it laterally through their peers or even downward to other people who don’t report to them directly.

And so as we wrap, we can see that there’s a few different ways to drive social influence in the organization by the form of power or politics. And so this brings us to our close on power, influence, and politics.