Org. Behaviour & Analysis- Power Lecture Notes, Reading List Book Summaries and Essay Plans
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Course
Organisational Behaviour & Analysis
Institution
University Of Oxford
Detailed notes, including lecture notes, reading list book summaries and essay plans for the Oxford University FHS Organisational Behaviour & Analysis course's section on Power (Week 4 of the course).
"Since the material interests of groups within an organisation will always differ, the
deployment of power and the existence of conflict are a natural and inevitable part of
organisational life". Discuss.
Under what conditions is power expected to play an important role in decision-making?
The power of organisational actors is fundamentally determined by the importance of what
they do in organisations and their skill in doing it.
Why is it so difficult for groups to make decisions? Discuss with reference to individual vs.
group interests in organisations.?
Introduction
Functionalist View- suggests that everyone has same intrinsic goals which would suggest
no conflicts. Reality, this is not the case as individuals are heterogenous beings.
Marx: antagonistic interests within capitalist organisations create an environment where
managers look to gain as much output from employees as possible relative to their wage
and employees seek to maximise wage relative to the amount they work and conflict
therefore exists.
Morgan’s (1986) analysis of organisations in a political image contributes to the idea of
divergent workplace interests, where conflict arises due to interdependencies,
competition for scarce resources, and generally different goals and priorities.
Dahl’s (1957): ‘power involves an ability to get another person to do something that he
or she would otherwise not have done’.
o Power is needed to correct interests in order to create a common purpose such
that an organisation can focus itself on achieving its defined goals.
The existence of divergent interests suggests the need for power.
Lukes’ (1974) ‘3 dimensions of power’, with each successive dimension adding a greater
and more comprehensive view of power, and the pluralist, unitary and radical views of
power show that, while conflict is likely in organisational life, even with the existence of
divergent interests and the deployment of power, it is not inevitable.
P1: Individual’s interests
Morgan’s (1986) political image of the organisation: organisations exist as structures
that must find ways to create order and direction amongst people with potential diverse
and conflicting interests.
The potential for conflict exists because different groups have different needs for power,
self-perceptions and more generally, different interests.
o Morgan (1986)- interests are predispositions embracing goals, values, desires,
expectations & other orientations and inclinations that lead a person to act in
one way rather than another
These depend on organisational task, personal life & career
Lukes (1974), two distinct definitions of interests:
o ‘Real interests’- innate desires of an individual and represent the untamed
motivations of the individuals that work in organisation.
o ‘Subjective interests’ - resultant interests of individuals after they have been
exposed to power structures and organisational influences that change both
preferences.
, ‘Real interests’ are exogenous to the organisation and ‘subjective interests’ are
endogenous.
o Helpful to seeing how conflict in an organisation can be avoided
P2: One Dimensional View of Power
If power is expressed in either a pluralist or radical approach, conflict is inevitable.
Pluralist approach: authoritarian tendencies are kept in check by the free play of
multiple interest groups competing and bargaining for shares of power.
o Mirrors Lukes’ (1974) one-dimensional view of power- power is distributed
pluralistically in society and can be identified by looking at who has control over
the outcome of a situation when a conflict arises.
o If exercising power is a process of political bargaining, then conflict is inevitable
because it is necessary in order to express power and make decisions.
o Pffefer & Salancik (1978)- organisations seen as settings in which groups with
varying interests come together and engage in exchanges
Burns (1961): organisations propagate a natural environment for political exchanges due
to their designs as systems of simultaneous competition and co-operation.
o Balancing opposing focuses requires negotiation, creating opportunities for
conflict.
Radical view of power: hierarchical application of power that creates conflict between
the ‘ruling-class’, (Marx - owners of the means of production), and the subordinate
classes.
o Power is unequally distributed and society and its institutions are characterised
by confrontation between fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable vested
interests
o Taylor and Ford adopted this view of power:
Removing employee autonomy, coercing them into a particular approach
to work through bureaucratic constructions of legitimacy that created
acceptance that management had a right to dictate working life.
o Employee repression leads to extensive conflicts, as shown by the existence of
trade unions.
o BUT Morgan (1986): radical view of power may be inapplicable in developed
economies, with the decline in manufacturing, but provides a strong basis for the
existence of conflict in developing countries, where organisations are still more
‘mechanistic’.
Conflict is crucial in providing an experimental test of power attributions and without
conflict, the exercise of power will fail to show.
P3: 2nd Dimension of Power
Lukes’ (1974) 2nd dimension of power: conflict can be avoided when reconciling
divergent interests.
Bachrach & Baratz (1970): one-dimensional view of power overlooks situations where
power is used to avoid conflict and so conflict is not overt.
o Organisations are not static like Marx thinks and controls over the agenda
influence ability to minimise conflict
o Power can be exercised to ‘limit the scope of decision making to relatively safe
issues’, hence avoiding conflicts.
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