CRITICAL PERPECTIVES
ON
ORGANIZATION THEORY
Continued
The Power Politics Perspective
Learning Objectives
1.
2.
3.
Describe the role of power and
politics in organizations
State the main advantage and
disadvantage of the power politics
perspective on organization
Understand the scope for the
exercise of choice in terms of
organizational design and change
Political behavior in
organizations
Organizations are political system, coalitions of
interests, and rationality is defined only with
respect to unitary and consistent ordering of
preferences
Robbins (1986) remarked ‘a political view can
explain much of irrational behavior in
organizations’
Postmodernist take focus on relationship between
power and knowledge and on the way that
power is used to promote particular views of
reality and to legitimate particular forms of
knowledge in organizations
Power and Politics
Power is the possession of position and or
resources
Politics is the deployment of
influence/leverage
Robbins (1987) defines organizational
politics is the efforts of organizational
members to mobilize support for or
against policies, rules, goals or other
decisions in which the outcome will have
some effect on them.
Researcher Political behavior identifies 7
ploys used by manager when seeking
to influence superiors, equals and
subordinate:
1.
Reason (most popular tactic/ploy)
2.
Friendliness
3.
Coalition
4.
Bargaining
5.
Assertiveness
6.
Higher authority
7.
sanctions
Etzioni (1975) identified 4 distinct
types of power used in
organizations :
1. Coercive power
2. Remunerative power
3. Normative power
4. Knowledge power
Managing and Changing
Organizations
Murray (1989), Morgan (1986) and Robbins
(1987) said that process of organizational
change is inherently a political one
Pettigrew (1987) maintain that the process
of change is shaped by:
 the interests and commitments of
individuals and groups
 force of bureaucratic momentum
 significant change in the environment
 the manipulation of the the structural
decisions
THE REALIST
PERSPECTIVE
The realism is a reality “out there” waiting
to be dicovered. Realism has been applied
to the social sciences and explicitly
applied it to management and
organisations.
Realism is a riposte to both modernism
and postmodernism. The modernism
object to the social construction side of
the realist’ reality, whilst the
postmodernism object to the realist’claim
that there is only one reality and it can be
discovered
The Complexity perspective
Complexity serves as an umbrella term for a
number of theories, ideas and research
programme that are derived from many
different disiplines in the natural sciences.
Complexity theories are concerned with the
emergence of order in dynamic non linear
system operating at the edge of chaos,
such as weather systems, which are
constantly changing and where the laws of
cause and effect appear not to apply.
The implications for organisations
In considering complexity theories and
organisational change, one of the key questions
is to ask ”what’s new?” Implications for
organisations :
1.
There will be a need for much greater
democracy and power equalisation in all aspects
of organisational life, instead of just narrow
employee partisipation in change
2.
Small-scale incremental change and large-scale
radical-transformational change will need to be
rejected in favour of a third kind which lies
between these two, and which is continous and
based on self-organisation at the team/group
level
3.
In achieving effective change, order-generating
rules have the potential to overcome the
limitations of rational, linear, top-down,
strategy-dirven approaches to change
Summary
1.
2.
3.
Power and politics are amongst the most
important factors influencing decision
making in organizations
Organizations as shifting coalitions of
groups and individuals seeking to
promote policies, and decisions that
enhanced or maintain their position in
the organization
Politics comes to the fore when major
issue of structural change or resource
allocation are concerned