Power & Politics

Power & Politics

This may be the toughest of all areas within corporate life, dealing with power and politics. It can make or break a career, cause many sleepless nights, and often has very little to do with the actual job employee thought he was paid to do. Some companies are better or worse than others in the amount of political activity required in the job. In some companies, playing corporate politics is the only job you have time for. In the military, it is only marginally important. Usually, the larger the company, the more part the politics play in your ability to perform.

In order to be successful in the corporate world, people need power. The types of power available are formal power and informal power. Formal power is most easily recognized in our society: generals and presidents have formal position power. Informal power is less well understood, however, it is far stronger than formal power over the long term. The power of respect gained as a result of what we know and what we can do. It is important to consider the personality type of the target of influence when selecting a power strategy. In order to influence someone, several strategies may be used involvement, negotiation, direction, and enlistment. Building a Professional Network Outside used to be a less important issue than it is today, with mergers, acquisitions, down sizing and major companies restructuring almost daily. Many very successful and highly competent people have found themselves out of work due to the economy, industry changes, corporate politics or just plain bad luck. The true value of a professional network is combining people from with and individual work today, those worked with in the past, and those that work with in community or professional groups may be the difference between finding a new position quickly and facing financial disaster. Corporate politics also provides fresh ideas, new insights into daily challenges, different perspectives to use in old situations and a way to broaden your talents, skills and interests in a fun way. The outside network is often 'safety net' and support system of people who care about the employee, and have interests at heart. They aren't usually after the job, or concerned about the politics of the company, so are willing to provide advice without political bias. They usually have nothing to lose take their advice. It is very importance that individuals spent time and energy building a professional network.

According to our reading, power is defined as the ability to get someone to do something you want done or the ability to make things happen the way you want them to. Also describes leadership as a key power mechanism to make things happen. There are many ways you can get people to accomplish a task or different jobs. In every organization has to be someone in charge or in a power position. We found that in a power position we have six important aspects and those are; reward, coercive, legitimate, process, information, and representative. Each of these aspects contributes to the leadership style and varies according to the skills of the manager. Personal power is in the people regardless what position they hold. The three bases of personal power are expertise, rational persuasion, and reference. These are important bases in order to succeed in building and maintaining high levels of both position power and personal power. When building position power, managers should be able to demonstrate others that their work units are highly relevant to organizational goals and are able to respond to urgent people’s needs. Managers should keep their employees well inform and filter information down to the lowest level. An example of this is the military system, in which information is passing from the top