Contrast the five bases of power

12 POWER, INFLUENCE, AND POLITICS How Can I Apply These to Increase My Effectiveness? © 2014 Angelo Kinicki and Mel Fugate. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without permission of the authors. MAJOR TOPICS I’LL LEARN AND QUESTIONS I SHOULD BE ABLE TO ANSWER 12.1POWER AND ITS BASIC FORMS MAJOR QUESTION: What are the basic forms of power and how can they help me achieve my desired outcomes? 12.2POWER SHARING AND EMPOWERMENT MAJOR QUESTION: How can sharing power increase my power? 12.3EFFECTIVELY INFLUENCING OTHERS MAJOR QUESTION: How do my influence tactics affect my personal effectiveness? 12.4POLITICAL TACTICS AND HOW TO USE THEM MAJOR QUESTION: What are the many forms of politics, and how can understanding them make me more effective at school, at work, and socially? 12.5IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT MAJOR QUESTION: Do I seek only to impress, or to make a good impression? INTEGRATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING AND APPLYING OB Power, influence, and politics are some of the most common means by which you affect the behavior of others and they affect yours. Learning these tools will increase your effectiveness in managing individual, group, and organizational level outcomes. Page 403 winning at work MAKE MEETINGS WORK FOR YOU “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’”1 This cynical and funny quote resonates with employees everywhere. You’ve probably never heard, nor ever will hear, somebody pleading for more meetings. One estimate is that the average worker spends four hours a week in meetings and feels that at least half that time is wasted.2 Even worse, a sample of CEOs revealed that they spend on average 18 hours per week in meetings.3 Yet despite the pain, we know that people need to meet, and when managed effectively, groups and teams of people can accomplish great things. We therefore give you some practical tools to get the most out of your meetings, colleagues, and your time. And in the process everybody will appreciate you even more. LET’S START WITH COMMON COMPLAINTS Three of the most common complaints are that meetings: 1.Are unnecessary. 2.Don’t accomplish much. 3.Are too long. Smartphones only make this worse, as people are commonly distracted (busy texting) until they are asked to speak. WHAT TO DO 1.Make and distribute an agenda. Do more than simply state purpose, day, time, and location. Also tell participants specifically what they need to do to prepare. 2.Set and communicate a goal for the meeting. Tell participants in advance, and when you convene, what the end will look like. Explain what you want to accomplish by the time you conclude the meeting, such as a decision or plan of action. 3.Assign responsibilities. Assign roles and responsibilities for the meeting itself, and then verbally assign expectations for who is to do what as follow-up or next steps. 4.Set a time limit. Some experts suggest that meetings be limited to no more than 45 minutes. There are at least two benefits to this practice: (1) people typically schedule calendar items on the hour, and a 45-minute limit gives them time to get to and prepare for their next appointment; and (2) tasks expand to fill the time you give them (45 minutes will help keep you disciplined and on task).4 5.Experiment. For instance, if you typically do two meetings a week, or four per month, then try cutting that number in half. Doing more, or even the same, in fewer meetings is a benefit for everybody. Try it. 6.Be concise. Tell everybody that you expect concise comments that are on topic, and reinforce this by modeling the same behavior. 7.Marry complaints with solutions. Establish the expectation that if somebody raises an issue or complaint that they must also provide a potential solution. 8.Stick to a schedule. Start on time and end on time. FOR YOUWHAT’S AHEAD IN THIS CHAPTER The purpose of this chapter is to give you a survival kit for the rough-and-tumble side of organizational life. We do so by exploring the interrelated topics of power, empowerment, influence and persuasion, organizational politics, and impression management. These topics are in the group and team section of the book because they are about influencing others—individuals and groups. They also are important group-level processes in the Integrative Framework for Applying and Understanding OB. We will help you understand that how you influence others impacts their response and your effectiveness. The appropriate, skilled, and ethical use of the knowledge in this chapter will not only help set you apart from your peers, but also close the gap between you and those with more experience and bigger titles. Page 404 12.1POWER AND ITS BASIC FORMS MAJOR QUESTION What are the basic forms of power and how can they help me achieve my desired outcomes? THE BIGGER PICTURE You try to influence people all day, every day of your life, sometimes with great effort and other times without even being aware. And others are doing the same to you. To influence people, you draw on various types of power. Depending on the situation, you might simply tell the person to do what you want (such as if you’re his or her manager), or you might inspire the person with your charismatic personality and persuasive prowess (such as if you’re his or her coworker). How you choose to influence others, what types of power you use, can have important implications for how they respond. We will help you understand what the different types of power are and how they generate different responses in others. Such knowledge can make you more effective at managing outcomes across the levels of the Integrative Framework for Understanding and Applying OB. Power is defined as the ability to marshal human,