No Excuses: How You Can Turn Any Workplace into a Great One by Jennifer Robin & Michael Burchell

Author:Jennifer Robin & Michael Burchell [Robin, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-10-07T14:00:00+00:00

Organizational Politics

If you think about the word “politics,” negative images are likely to come to mind. Most people have an adverse reaction to the idea of politics. It conjures ideas of warring factions pushing their own self interests. We use phrases such as “politicking,” “playing politics,” and “it was just political” with a negative connotation.

Power is a key element in understanding politics. Power stems from a variety of sources, including reward power, coercive power, information power, resource power, expert power, referent power, and legitimate power. When people believe power is being purposefully used to guarantee some personal end, rather than one that serves the organization, they call that politics.

Thus, it is no small wonder that many of us are ambivalent about power. We understand its usefulness, but we would rather not talk about it. As Pfeffer observes, people are more concerned about the ends than the means, and therefore, they've trained themselves (and others) to avoid critical thinking and appreciation of how power can be used.3 We often judge organizational decisions absent this understanding and appreciation of the influence of power, unless, of course, power was used negatively. Then, trust is broken, and we've lost yardage to a great workplace.

Better, then, to understand power and politics and how they exist alongside creating a great workplace. Bolman and Deal discuss the role of politics in organizations by sharing that “politics” is “the realistic process of making decisions and allocating resources in a context of scarcity and divergent interests.”4 Thus, there is an inherent political dimension to most decisions in every organization. But upon closer examination, there are also the threads of trust, particularly when you think of building trust laterally while building trust with your team.

As an example, we once worked with a manager who was angry at his team. A series of missteps and missed deadlines had created real stress on the team, and the manager had started to try and “teach them a lesson” by taking away flexibility and other benefits and instituting very tight controls. Unfortunately, the manager missed the opportunity to direct and coach the team. His efforts had the opposite effect of what he had hoped, as team members became even less engaged and productive. By (re)positioning trust at the center of his efforts, he was able to practice positive politics.

Allocating resources in service of the organization's identity is a good thing, as long as everyone involved remembers that all members of the organization are on the same team. As an example, efforts to bolster your organization's identity should be broadly inclusive (such as when a company is developing its operating plan). Considering divergent opinions and making decisions fairly are also remedies to the downside of politics. All organizations deal with scarcity; it is when decisions are made unilaterally that divide employees into the “haves” and “have nots” that we worry about the loss of trust.

Being aware of the antecedents of political decision making (i.e., decision making about scarce resources in a context of widely differing

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