Power Survey 2000 - Background

Power and Influence in Organisations.

In the days before the rate of organisational change threatened to accelerate beyond the rate of learning. When organisations were predominantly stable, hierarchical and linear in structure. And before empowerment, de-layering and the complete re-inventing of the reporting structure happened, it was relatively easy to understand concepts like power and influence. The boss was usually called Sir or Mr, we all knew where the buck stopped, and the boundaries and limits of our roles and responsibilities were pretty clear. Today things seem much more complex; black and white seems to have given way to a hundred shades of grey.

The Accepted Wisdom

The accepted academic wisdom informs us that there are six sources of power and influence at work in organisations. They have been identified and described by Pamela Cummings in the USA and French and Raven in the UK as follows;

Authority - The formal power bestowed upon you by the organisation. The official mandate you have to make things happen.
Reward - You have the power to bestow gifts and favours upon others.
Punishment - You have the power to hurt others, to coerce them or to bully them.
Expertise - A combination of the experience, expertise, knowledge and know how.
Relationship - Making a positive personal connection with others. Using charm, empathy, networking, etc.
Association - A network of connections with people in high places. People treat you differently because of your connections with those in power, as in politics.

The above work is of course helpful in informing our understanding of how organisations work. However, if the organisation has experienced exponential change, then perhaps it is time to update and review our understanding of how power and influence works.

What is Power? What is Influence?

You may have noticed that I have loosely bundled power and influence together. They are of course different things. Power, like Authority, is usually described as our formal mandate to act and make decisions, usually within carefully defined boundaries. This is usually endorsed and made explicit to everyone by use of important sounding job titles like Director, Senior Manager, MD, etc.

Influence on the other hand appears to reside outside of job titles, corner offices, BMW's and other obvious power symbols, and is not necessarily reflective of levels of responsibility or status. It seems that whilst you need a title or a mandate to get formal power, anyone can have influence.

That said, influence and power do get confused. I might be influential if I am a technical expert, but if I am also the only person who understands the computer system, (and the organisation would go into seizure if I resigned) am I not powerful too? If I am a PA and control the diary of a Director, is that power or influence? Every influence strategy can also be a source of power. These examples alone perhaps highlight two other sources, namely Dependence and Access.

Whether it is power or influence I am less concerned, and I have decided to side step the semantic debate and concentrate on what can loosely be called "clout". What I am interested in is the forces people use and exert to get things done. How have they changed, and which are the most commonly used?

Updating the Model

To update and explore this further I have been conducting a research project of my own using the Internet and Email. The original impetus for this research came from a request for me to run a workshop on this subject for the Annual Conference of the London IPD in February 2000. This initially small project has expanded dramatically and has turned out to be so fascinating and rewarding that it has taken on a life of its own and this article sets out to share some of the initial results.

The basis of my research was to ask people one simple but clearly focused question.

"As a professional, going about your daily role, where do you get your personal power and influence from?"

My initial sample contained an even split between HR professionals and people from other functions, and a balance of male and female. I asked people, wherever possible to focus their response to single words and gave the following as examples, but stressed that I wanted to know their words.

Expertise, Intelligence, Networking, Attractiveness, Extroversion, Height, Size, Age, Hierarchy, Reputation, Volume, Contacts, Seniority, Co-operation, Empathy, Charm.

I also asked people to pass on the email to other colleagues and interested parties, (a hi-tech chain letter) I put the question on various web sites and message boards and also made a habit of asking everyone I met (much to their bemusement!) and noting their responses. Within an hour of "going live" I had my first responses, and by the end of the week, my email was jammed. Clearly I had hit something of a nerve.

The net result of this work is that I have a database of hundreds of replies, thousands of entries and 157 different single words that people have used to describe their sources of power and influence. Putting all this together I have been able to update the established thinking and develop a new model for understanding.

... continued in Power Survey 2000 - Initial Results

This is an extract from an article written by Mike Phipps for Training Journal in 2000.