Summary

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22 May 2019

Title: Managerial and Behavioral

The chapter of the book highlights the ways managers views themselves, an organization and uses their authority and power. Generally, managers view their organizations with the help of a strategic lens, such as a political lens and cultural lens. This reading discusses the political lens that managers use to view their organization and it also influences their decision making. Some of the managers consider an organization as a political system which holds the negative impact of conflicts and competition of resources (Dwyer, 10). The reason behind this view of managers can be understood from the perspective of power and how it is divided and used. Power not only arises from the legitimate authority but some other sources of personal power arise from information, expertise, the ability to give rewards, and referent and coercive power. The power that accrues to managers due to expertise, information and being someone, others want to be like has a positive impact on people and organization.

Another important aspect that managers have to consider is while decision making is how employees are impacted by their decisions. These interests are not merely individual but collective interests of the whole team or group. The challenge for managers is to analyze both collective and individual interests and then weigh the priority of them for their decision making. In addition, the power of stakeholders to stand against that decision must be taken into consideration. The power also comes from the critical resources a person or team holds such as the power of the sales team when an organization is in the need of market share. Managers have again the challenge to analyze the sources of power, finding out who will be affected more by the decisions, which party is going to oppose and how relationships can be built, to locate the myriad political problems (Dwyer, 14).

The article, “Who Gets Power and How They Hold onto It” discusses the significance of power as a basis of organizational decision making (Salancik and Pfeffer, 2). The authors hold the idea that power is not a dirty concept rather it enables the organization to respond to the changing strategic environment. The article emphasizes that political power is better than the institutional forms of power and it allows realistic resolution of conflicts between different interests in an organization (Salancik and Pfeffer, 13). The power is used in an organization to ensure the survival of different subunits in an organization and it does not follow the patterns of organizational design. The factors that influence power and its use in an organization are scarcity, uncertainty and criticality.

The power in an organization is also fluid and power structure changes with the changing strategic environment. Power also has the ability to impact activities beyond the original base. The legitimate power coming from the authority results in the creation of unquestionable organizational structures (Salancik and Pfeffer, 18). The manager's ability to control the flow of information aids the legitimate power and manager knows that others are depending on them. This type of power is also hard to remove or lessen as it also holds the authority to offer rewards and incentives. In this way, the more a firm exercises the legitimate power, the greater is the likelihood of it responding to the changing strategic needs and demand. This legitimate power is reflected by the low turn over rate of top management because they let the opposition out of the system. Therefore, the authors exert that management has to be aware of the changing strategic environment and must focus on managing it rather than its inner power structures (Salancik and Pfeffer, 20).

Works Cited

BIBLIOGRAPHY Dwyer, Dale J. "Understanding Your Organization." Dwyer, Dale J. Managing in a 21st Century Organization. Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2019. 10-15.

Salancik, Gerald R. and Jeffrey Pfeffer. "Who gets power, and how they hold on to it : a strategic-contingency model of power." Readings in the management of innovation (1982): p. 223-239.