Discuss the concept of power from both a management and worker perspective and provide some examples.

Management of activities in every company needs exercising of power. According to Asenov, using power potential is actually exercising of power - statement, that is not exactly right and the author himself is the first to oppose it several sentences after. Really, managers' power potential gives them the possibility to exercise power, but when managers use their power potential without getting expected results, in fact there is no exercising of power. (Kamenov and others, p. 239) In this case, the asymmetry of dependence, evolving from the power potential, apparently is not enough to overcome the resistance of the dependent side.

There is an opinion that company management exercises three types of power - deep, but narrow (resources tend to maximum, but the responsibilities are limited), shallow, but wide (resources incline towards minimum, but responsibilities involve stages from the beginning till the end of the managerial process), and absolute power (maximum deep and wide). This classification could include fourth type of power - minimum shallow and narrow, when the manager works upon specific managerial tasks, insignificant part of the whole managerial process, with minimum resources. This situation could be often observed in bureaucratic organisations and when upper managers are with authoritarian style. From the point of view of power effectiveness, it is a more favourable situation than exercising shallow and wide power. Favourability evolves from the fact that there is a correspondence between the two characteristics (limited power potential corresponds to limited by scale managerial tasks). In other words, the power potential is enough to follow the objectives and to execute certain managerial functions.

Besides the nature of tasks and objectives, the problem of sufficiency of managers' power potential concerns the power potential of the subordinate. Kamen Kamenov has the right to say that "if a concentration of power exists at the higher levels, it would be at the expense of power at lower levels of management and vise versa - more power at the lower levels decreases the quantity of power in the central management body" (Kamenov and others, p. 255). This means that besides the higher positions, the lower positions have certain possibilities for impact. And even more - Kamenov supposes the possibility the power of upper managers to be decreased by lower managers.

The power potential of lower managers depends on the resources that they possess, and on the conditions, they are displayed in. However, practicing managers have to remember that both, resources and conditions, are variable quantities. Their direction is often unpredictable and therefore, the power potential changes are difficult to predict. For example, even such widely spread conviction as the statement that with the rising within the organisational hierarchy manager's power potential increases, could be questioned. Usually the upper movement accelerates the contact with external environment and the manager is forced to consider more interests - especially, if her/his rising in position is a result of preliminary made agreements and engagements. Therefore, in order to have a reliable notion about her/his real power, the manager has to accept her/his dependence on resources and conditions and to understand the possibilities to influence through obedience.

Power in business management could be linked with the distribution of economic values between organisational members, under overt or hidden asymmetrical dependence between them. The term "economic values" combines all the results from the business activity that are valuable for the individual or the group. They could be material or symbolic, as well as positive or negative. Positive material result is the receiving of a reward, and negative - various kinds of material sanctions, for example deduction of salary.

Thus, from a worker's perspective, they succumb to power exercised by their superiors or managers, either to earn positive benefit or stay away from negative impact.

source: http://www.ejournalnet.com/Contents/Issue_2/4/4_2002.htm

2. Based on the article "A Strategic Contingencies Theory of Intraorganizational Power," by D. J. Hickson, C. R. Hinings, C. A. Lee, R. E. Schneck, and J. M. Pennings, that appeared in the Administrative Science Quarterly, in 1971, 216-219, explain the power of a group or individual within the work environment. Also discuss any factors that limit the explanatory usefulness of the article.

The theory presented in this paper relates the power of a subunit within a work organization to its ability or capacity in coping with uncertainty, its substitutability, and its centrality, through the control of strategic contingencies for other dependent activities.

Following Emerson, Hickson and his associates take power as "a property of the social relationship, not of the actor," (p217), where the context of the relationship is a formal organization. They perceive organizations as systems of interdepartmental units a major task element of which is coping with uncertainty. This reasoning is in the tradition of open system theorists such as Thompson who conceive organizations as "intermediate and faced with uncertainty , but subject to criteria of rationality and hence needing certainty." (P217) To cope with uncertainty, the authors argue, the task is divided and allotted to the subsystems, the division of labor creating an interdependence among them. Where imbalance of this "reciprocal interdependence" is present, power relations arise. Thus, the division of labor is viewed as the ultimate source of intraorganizational power.

Adopting Dahl's concept of power, Hickson and his associates define power as "the determination of the behavior of one social unit by another." (p218) Even though power as coercion is another commonly employed conceptualization in the literature, the authors dismiss it as an inadequate definition and choose to regard coercion as a means of power. They also borrow from Kaplan and specify three dimensions of power as weight, domain, and scope. The weight of power is the degree to which B affects the probability of A behaving in a certain way, the domain of power is the number of A's, persons or collectivities, whose behavior is determined, and the scope of power is defined as the range of behaviors of each A that are determined. They use the subunit to illustrate these points: "For subunit power within an organizaion, domain might be the number of other units affected by the issues, scope the range of decision issues affected, and weight the degree to which a given subunit affects the decision process on the issues." (p219)

Hickson and his colleagues, emphasizing uncertainty posed by the environment as a primary source of power in work organizations, argue that subunits in organizations obtain power through one another depending on the amount and significance of the uncertainty to which they relate, and on the extent of their success in coping with it and thereby reducing uncertainty for other subunits. In this paper the authors primarily concentrate on analyzing the intraorganizational power between subunits which are "reciprocally interdependent"

Limitations of the article:

There is some ambiguity in the paper concerning the source of uncertainty faced by the work organizations: is it the environment or the division of labor? The authors actually point to these two factors both as the "ultimate source of uncertainty" in different places in the paper. Whether it is the environmentally posed uncertainty or the internally created uncertainty that ultimately give rise to differential power between subunits in work organizations remains unanswered. If both are legitimate sources of uncertainty, then an interesting question to ask is, which source plays a more important role in the determination of power in work organizations?

Another possible weakness in this paper (though probably a minor one, but nevertheless worth pointing out) lies with the authors' definition of the term "substitutability". In the paper it is defined as "the ability of the organization to obtain alternative performance for the activities of a subunit." A yet finer definition would be " the ability of an organization to obtain alternative and/or equivalent performance for the activities of a subunit."

Further, The authors acknowledge that their strategic contingency theory "errs on the side of simplicity", and in recognition of this, they hold constant in their theory all the other factors that may relate to power between subunits in work organizations by adding a group of "other things being equal" variables that are assumed to affect power in other ways rather than by control of contingencies, e.g. qualities of interdepartmental relationships such as competitiveness versus collaborativeness. Other possible sources of influence on power as acknowledged by the authors are tradition, culture, and personal links of subunits with the top personnel.

source: http://amadeus.management.mcgill.ca/~mark.mortensen/orgweb/summaries/mse/content/Hickson.html

Few other limitations:

Ignores that critical uncertainties are socially determined and organization structure is relatively stable over time
Static and deterministic, and the process of power acquisition is omitted.
Ignores the variance in power distribution.
Focuses on the vertical variations in power distribution, while omitting the horizontal variations.

source: http://www.stanford.edu/~jchong/articles/Yosem/Pfeffer%20--%20Summary%20of%20Micropolitics.doc.