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1. MANAGING POWER, POLITICS AND
DECISION MAKING IN ORGANIZATIONS
I always thought politics was a dirty word at work, but
it’s reality, it’s reality and it’s not, it’s not being sneaky,
it’s just making sure that, you know, your people that
are going to help you go where you need to go...
– Young Consultant in a Global Company
© Stewart R. Clegg, Martin Kornberger and Tyrone Pitsis 2016

2. OUTLINE
• Learning objectives
• Introduction
– Organizational politics and power
• Sources of power
• Politics
– Political arenas and resistance
• Domination
• Soft domination
• Total institutions
• Experiments with authority
• Decision making, power and ethics
• Case study: power and megaprojects

3. LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After completing this topic you will be able to:
• List the main resources proposed as bases of power
• Understand how power and legitimacy are related
• Know what power relations are
• Recognize that power conflicts are normal and
acceptable in organizations
• Understand how management of power may form a
normal part of management practice
• Describe ‘soft’ ways in which power operates
• Use power positively
• Know how decision-making in organizations operates

4. INTRODUCTION
• Organizational Politics
– Refers to the network of social relations between people
in and around organizations – whether willingly or not,
in practices of power
• Power
– Is the an actor’s chance to realize their own will in a
social action, even against the resistance of others
– The actor may be an individual or a collective entity
– Power can mean forcing others to do things against
their will
– Power can also be far more positive and less mechanical
when it shapes and frames what others want to do –
seemingly out of their own volition

5. SOURCES OF POWER
• Legitimacy attaches to something, whether a
particular action or social structure, when
there is a widespread belief that it is just and
valid
• Organizational legitimacy is the ‘generalized
perception or assumption that the actions of
an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate
within a social system
• Uncertainty is the inability to know how to
continue some action, a lack of a rule or
undecidability about which rule to apply

6. SOURCES OF POWER
• Strategic contingencies theory
– Assumes that management’s definitions prevail
– Sometimes they do, in which case management has
exercised power
– When they do not, management is outmanoeuvred
• Resource dependency theory
– Focuses on how managers in organizations secure
the flow of resources essential for survival
– Organizations strive to influence organizations upon
which they are dependent for scarce and critical
resources

7. POLITICS
Politics arise from
• Structural divisions in the organization
• The complexity and the degree of uncertainty
attached to a dilemma
• The salience of issues for different actors and
identities in the organization
• The external pressure coming from
stakeholders or other actors or organizations
in the environment.
• The history of past politics in the organizations
in question

8. POLITICAL ARENAS AND
RESISTANCE
• Organizations are political arenas
• Resistance to change consists of those
organizational activities and attitudes that aim
to thwart, undermine, and impede change
initiatives
– Dialectics
– Resistance by distance
– Legitimate and illegitimate resistance

9. DOMINATION AND
AUTHORITY
• The Paradox of Power
– You have power only if you are in a superior
position in the organization and are
opposed in what you want to do by others
who are at the same or a lower level
– When you want to do something against the
resistance of these others, it is termed
authority
– Authority is legitimate!
– Resistance to superordinate will is seen as
illegitimate

10. SOFT DOMINATION
• Soft domination is
– Based on the appearance of equality in the
organization among peers
– The reality of a pervasive system of
controls, chief among which are
instrumentally legitimate techniques used
by the entire management community
• Electronic and team surveillance
• Empowerment
• Concertive control
• Emancipation

11. SOFT DOMINATION
• Hegemony
– A system of rule or domination where
those who are being dominated, or ruled,
consent to that rule
• Institutional entrepreneurs are
– People who occupy key positions with wide
legitimacy attached to them, who are
– Capable of bridging between the interests
of diverse stakeholders
– Have the capacity to introduce new
practices and persuade stakeholders of the
good fit of these practices with the
routines and values that they embrace

12. TOTAL INSTITUTIONS
• Total institutions are organizations that
contain the totality of the lives of those who
are their members
• What all total institutions have in common:
– Each member’s daily life is carried out in
the immediate presence of others
– The members are very visible
– The members tend to be strictly
regimented and often wear institutional
clothing
– Life in a total institution is governed by
strict, formal, rational planning of time

13. EXPERIMENTS WITH AUTHORITY
• The Milgram experiment
– Could you do unimaginable things to
others?
• The ethics of putting people in camps

14. POWER, POLITICS AND
DECISION-MAKING
• Rational Model of Decision-Making
– Problem is defined
– Information is collected
– Solutions are offered and weighed
– Solution is chosen
– Solution is implemented
• Bounded-rationality
– Problems are not easily definable
– Information is never free nor limited
– Humans are not rational but biased
• The Garbage Can refers to
– situations characterized by ‘problematic
preferences’, ‘unclear technology’, and ‘fluid
participation’

15. ETHICS OF DECISION-MAKING
AND POWER
• Insofar as one is ‘free’, one’s liberty to make
decisions is confined within these bounds.
• Post-bureaucratic era: autonomy, freedom,
enterprise in making choices
• Market norms and culture may replace the
formal habits of bureaucratic rules and
policies, organizational control of ethics
• ‘Good’ governance?

16. POSITIVE POWER
• Seven Steps of Power
1. Decide what your goals should be and what you are trying to
accomplish in consultation with direct stakeholders in your
organization
2. Diagnose patterns of dependence and interdependence; which
individuals both inside and outside the organization are
influential and important to achieving these goals?
3. What are the points of view of the important people likely to
be? How will they feel about what you are trying to do?
4. What are the power bases of the important people? Which of
them is the most influential in the decision?
5. What are your bases of power and influence? What bases of
influence can you develop to gain more positive control over
the situation?
6. Which of the various strategies and tactics for exercising
power seem most appropriate and are likely to be effective,
given the situation you confront?
7. Based on 1-6, choose an ethical course of action to get things
done

17. CASE STUDY
Power And megaprojects
Clearly, this is a very different approach to
management and power relations than we
would find in the vast majority of similar
cases.
Why do you think this was so?
What are the important power lessons that
you take from the case?
What are the crucial aspects of the project’s
design, in your view, that created the
success of the megaproject in our minds?