Power And Politics

Power and Politics
Thad Barton
University of Phoenix

All organization have power. Managers have power and leaders have power. In this power is mixed politics. This paper will discuss power and politics inside organizations. This paper will provide an analysis of organizational management and leadership practices and how that impacts organizations. There will also be two real-world examples of the relationship between power and politics and how this relates to management and leadership practices.
Power and Politics
In organizational behavior power is “the ability to get someone to do something someone else wants done or the ability to make things happen in the way they want them to” (Schermerhorn, Hunt, and Osborn, 2008). So basically power is a person’s influence, either positive or negative, over someone or a group of people.   The source of someone’s power can come from a variety of ways.   Some main sources of power however, are positional, reward, information, representative, and process. Positional is solely tied to the person’s position in an organization. The higher a person is in the organization the more power they have. Reward power is how a manager gets others to do what he wants them to do by using rewards as the incentive. These rewards can be any number of things, compliments, money, promotions and so on. Reward power has its opposite in coercive power.   This is the denial of rewards or the punishment of an employee.
The next group of someone’s power is similar. Process power is the power to affect the inputs that make up the outputs. This could be in the literal sense or in the analytical sense. Informational power is someone influence over someone else access to information, this where someone gets the phrases “right to know” or “need to know”. Many managers guard their “right to know” so they can influence actions instead of react to situations. Representational power is exactly what it seems, “the formal right conferred by the firm to...