Power, Authority, and Influence
Power refers to the capacity of an individual, organization, or team to influence other people. On the other hand, influence is a behavior that has the capacity to alter ones attitude. This paper presents various techniques that I use in my workplace to gain power and influence.
According to Singh (2010), there are five bases of power namely referent power, coercive power, legitimate power, expert power, and reward power. These bases form the French and Raven model introduced by Bertram Raven and John French in the year 1959. As a leader at my workplace, the organization grants me, reward, and coercive power to enable me perform various tasks and responsibilities without any form of interference from other employees. Expert and referent power bases are not difficult to acquire because they depend on the individual characteristics of a leader. For any leader to be in a position to undertake his or her roles effectively, there is a great need to comprehend that power should not be taken simply as a way of changing other people’s behavior or attitude. This can happen only if a leader has the capacity to influence the actions of another person within the organization.
In many times, I usually apply the reward tactic to influence employees towards performing a given task. As noted by Crawley, Swailes & Walsh (2011), reward is extended to the high performing employees and those who show a lot of commitment in helping the organization to attain the set targets and goals. Giving rewards to productive employees helps them to remain motivated and prevents instances where some of them would want to use unacceptable ways to get their work done. Apart from giving rewards, I have gone a step further and applied the level measured risks technique as a way of putting out my suggestions, ideas, and as a means of giving/receiving requests as I struggle to improve the general performance of the organization. At my workplace, other employees are also given some form of power by allowing them to have control of information flow, and teaching them appropriate techniques that should be applied whenever there is need to deal with uncertainties in the organization.
With regard to gaining influence at my workplace, leaders can gain influence by applying different influence tactics such as assertiveness, coalition control, persuasion, silent authority, upward appeal, and information control. At my workplace, I usually find it worthwhile to adopt soft influence tactics like subtle ingratiation and persuasion to get the work done. As explained by Tjosvold & Leung (2004), managers or leaders who apply hard influence tactics such as assertiveness in an organization will at most times find it difficult to control the attitudes or behaviors of employees. However, it should be understood that the appropriateness of a given influence tactic depends on the power base of an individual who is giving the command. If the person being influenced is in a lower level, it will be easy to convince that person to act in a specific way.
Conclusively, it is evident that a person or a leader can gain power and influence in an organization by engaging in actions that serve as motivation to other people within the organization. In my organization, I have managed to gain power and influence by adopting the bases of power found in the French and Raven model, and adopting acceptable influence tactics such as persuasion.
References
Crawley, E., Swailes, S., & Walsh, D. (2011). Introduction to international human resource management. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singh, K. (2010). Organizational behaviour: Text and cases. Chandigarh: Pearson.
Tjosvold, D., & Leung, K. (2004). Leading in high growth Asia: Managing relationship for teamwork and change. New Jersey: World Scientific.
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