Using Persuasion Principles to gain Power in Organizations

Playing organizational politics and using power to implement our ideas

There is an odd ambivalence about influence, power and organizational politics.

When people hear the word politics, they often think about backstabbing behaviours and deals behind closed doors (Fleming & Spicer, 2014). But from a more rational perspective politics is simply an “activity that rearranges relations between individuals” (Arendt, 1970).

Also power has a negative connotation reminding us of people that abuse their powerful position. While that can be the case, power can also fulfill a simple purpose, as “the basic energy to initiate and sustain action, translating intention into reality” (Bennis and Nanus, 1985).

I believe one needs influence to gain power in the first place. The word influence is often confused with manipulation. I think it is this ambivalence that prevents individuals from gaining power and playing organizational politics.

Influence can certainly be used to manipulate individuals and situations, but I think it also serves a purpose as a tool of persuasion in organizations.

We need to stop discrediting influence and persuasion as manipulation when they are used to benefit the organization.

To follow the metaphor of Pfeffer: “We do not abandon chemicals, […] because of the dangers associated with them; instead we consider danger an incentive to get training […] to use these forces productively”.

And that training is also necessary for influence and persuasion. We are already subconsciously using most of these techniques anyways in our daily interactions with people.

Now it is time to acknowledge that we need to purposely and effectively use persuasion principles to gain power in organizations — just as we need to become skillful at playing organizational politics and using power to implement our ideas.

Theoretical perspectives

We often think of power as something that derives from a formal position of authority in an organization. But power extends to the organizational level and institutional field as well.

There are also different use cases that go far beyond a positional interpretation. The scholars Fleming & Spicer can help us broaden our view.

In an extensive literature review on the concept in management and organization science, they conceptualize a framework that consists of faces and sites.

They classify coercion, manipulation, domination and subjectification as faces of power to illustrate the different ways it can be used. Power can be enacted in different sites, that is in, through, over or against organizations.

Fleming & Spicer describe coercion as the direct mobilization of power.

• In organizations this is expressed in formal authority, bases of power, but also in control over valuable resources or sources of uncertainty.
• Coercive power over organizations can be illustrated with a CEO that controls scarce resources and the entire firm.
• The organization can also serve as a vehicle through which resources needed by stakeholders can be controlled and external pressure reduced.
• Finally, coercive power can also be used against organizations, like in the case of social movements that demand change from firms.

Another episodic face of power is manipulation.

• In organizations, this face is exercised leveraging positions in social networks or engaging in impression management.
• Manipulation over the organization is most often expressed by defining which political issues can or cannot be discussed.
• Through organizations, decision making criteria of institutional fields can be manipulated by establishing operating principles.
• Manipulation against organizations often involves shifting the political climate surrounding the firm and managing the media image of the organization.

Domination as a systemic form of power makes relations of power seem inevitable and natural.

• In organizations it creates a sense of inevitability that actively depoliticizes the organizational climate.
• Domination over organizations is often external control that shapes the ideological climate.
• Through organizations, other institutional players can be systematically dominated, by shaping the regulatory environment.
• Finally, systemic power against organizations in the form of domination is systematically challenging, opposing and resisting organizations as political systems.

Fleming & Spicer describe subjectification as shaping the sense of self, experiences and emotions.

• As such, subjectification in organizations seeks to align the self with the firm by articulating discourses that shape the individual’s identity.
• Subjectification over organizations is often driven by external actors that shape identity to redefine how organizational members manage themselves.
• Subjectification through organizations seeks to create new professional identities or legal categories in the institutional field.
• When subjectification is expressed against organizations, it pressures organizational members to change their self-identity, rather than altering the firm’s climate.

The strength of Fleming & Spicer’s framework is its biggest weakness at the same time. Their comprehensive overview of power in the management and organization literature makes it certainly a key theoretical perspective.

But I think power in that literature is just one — and perhaps a somewhat limited — perspective to understand the phenomenon. After all, it is individuals that accrue, exercise and experience power.

In that sense, the framework is of little value for organizational members to understand how power is used against them, or how they can develop influencing techniques to gain power and exercise it in a political climate.

Yes, the purpose of their framework is primarily to summarize extant literature, but the scholars do so by leaving out the most essential part of any firm.

Fleming & Spicer reify organizations with their four sites and forget that there are people inside running it.

To pretend that the organization itself can be used as a vehicle or can be opposed to change its operating principles, neglects that the organization itself actually does not exist.

According to Watson’s process relational perspective, any organization is comprised of individuals that engage in a process of continuous sense making and social construction of the organization. In reifying the organization, Fleming & Spicer themselves exercise a form of systemic domination by leaving out the fact that the organizational world is made and constantly remade by human actions.

Pfeffer offers an alternative and more specific perspective on power, by especially focusing on sources.

He adds the concept of organizational politics to the discussion when elaborating on failures to capitalize on innovations. For him, innovation and change initiatives challenge the status quo, which makes them an inherently political activity. He concludes that a failure to accomplish these initiatives is often linked to problems in developing political will and expertise.

One way Pfeffer illustrates the political climate is by providing an alternative perspective on decision making. He starts with three observations:

1. A decision in itself does not change anything.
2. The consequences of any decision cannot be foreseen when making it.
3. We spend more time living with the consequences of decisions.

We therefore should be more concerned with adapting our decisions to the information we gain as events unfold.

Next, Pfeffer discusses how decisions can be implemented. To get things done through hierarchical authority can be challenging nowadays, as most organizational members need to cooperate with others outside of their chain of command to accomplish their job. Another way to implement ideas is to develop a shared organizational vision, but that is a process which takes time.

Pfeffer therefore advocates considering power and influence as a method for implementing decisions.

“Power is defined here as the potential ability to influence behavior, to change the course of events, to overcome resistance, and to get people to do things that they would not otherwise do” — Pfeffer.

• When there is moderate interdependence between organizational members, they need to develop power and the ability to influence the people they depend on to accomplish their goals.
• Scarce resources increase interdependence and therefore the need to use influence to secure and defend these resources.
• Differences in point of view naturally create disagreements, especially the greater task specialization is.
• Finally, importance of the issue defines how political the situation is and how scarce a resource can become.

Pfeffer identifies three different sources of power in organizations.

1. The ability to control resources, like budgets, physical facilities or positions leads to more power as it allows you to gain allies and supporters. A key strategy to accrue power is to limit access to a resource that you control. Elaborating on resources, Pfeffer emphasizes that the most valuable one is one that incremental– because it is easier to introduce new resources into a system than taking them away from individuals.
2. Another source of power is control over or access to information. According to Pfeffer it is not just technical knowledge, but especially knowledge of the organization’s social system that produces power. In that sense, your power depends on your location in the communication network.
3. Betweenness describes to what extend an organizational is located between pairs of individuals, as an indicator for information control. Connectedness illustrates the centrality in the network. Closeness indicates independence, describing the distance between individuals inside the firm. Working at a company’s headquarter and being situated in a place with frequent traffic from co-worker increases physical centrality. The greater the task interdependence, the more people you will be in contact with and the more connected we get.

In Fleming & Spicer’s framework, Pfeffer can be most likely located in episodic expressions of power, more specifically coercion and manipulation in organizations.

Pfeffer is part of the literature that illustrates formal authority, bases of power, position in social networks and control over valuable resources inside organizations. In that sense, it compensates for the broad organizational view that Fleming & Spicer maintain in their framework and allows us to understand how power actually gets accumulated.

With its foundation in the resource-based view and its comprehensive argument for why power is needed in organizations, Pfeffer certainly provides a key theoretical perspective for anyone wanting to understand organizational politics.

Nevertheless, Pfeffer tends to also neglect the individual that is driven by intrinsic motivation, how they construct their environment and with what intention they are playing the political game.

In the words of Watson, Pfeffer does not consider that there is a strategic exchange between the individual worker, manager or entrepreneur, and the organization that individual is attached to. Both have different strategies, and resource allocation depends on the personal life strategy, as much as it depends on the work orientation of an individual.

One way to approach this is to consider power and politics from a psychological and individual perspective.

As I argue, organizational members need the capacity to influence to gain power. Although that influence is often discredited as manipulation, it serves an organizational purpose as persuasion — for example when it comes to coalition building, resource acquisition or implementation of decisions.

In Harnessing the Science of Persuasion, the professor of psychology Robert Cialdini advocates persuasion as one of the leader’s essential tools.

Cialdini observed how persuasion in everyday interactions is driven by basic principles that can be taught, learned and applied.

• The principle of liking describes that we like to cooperate with people who we like; and we like people who are similar to us or who praise us.
• We as human beings tend to feel an obligation for returning favours after we have received something — the principle of reciprocity.
• As part of socialization we learned how to look at others for social proof to follow the behaviour of those we can identify with.
• We like to be consistent in our verbal and written commitments, especially those that we make voluntary in public.
• We have learned to defer to authority and experts to provide us with shortcuts for decision making.
• Finally, the principle of scarcity illustrates what we learned from Pfeffer as well: we value what is scarce.

While these principles do not provide us with a key theoretical perspective to fully comprehend power and politics in organizations, they shed light on how these dynamics evolve. In the daily interaction with individuals our behaviour is governed by how we construct and make sense of the world. In this social construction we often rely on things we learned during socialization — unwritten rules that define how we should behave in a society.

The persuasion principles make a valuable attempt at capturing these implicit rules and allow us to complement perspectives on power and organizational politics that Fleming & Spicer and Pfeffer provide us with.

To exemplify the value and limitations of these perspective we now turn our focus to three different cases to assess how power dynamics and political challenges evolve in firms and how individuals cope with that.

Exemplifying and analyzing perspectives on power and organizational politics

Jess Westerly was hired as an Assistant Product Owner at Kauflauf GmbH and she failed miserably at implementing her first idea.

Her supervisor, Tim Roeder, asked her to analyze the sales call patterns of the company’s field consultants to identify opportunities for improving profitability and come up with a proposal.

In an email to all field consultants with the opening sentence “Greetings to my new sales colleagues at Kauflauf GmbH” she communicated that proposal by asking all sales reps to redirect their sales efforts towards more profitable segments in the market. To substantiate her request, she attached her detailed analysis and simulation to the email and used the authority of Tim Roeder to back up her proposal.

The overall response from the field consultants was strong resistance as they felt “offended by the memo’s implied infringement on their decisions about how to spend their time”.

Adopting Pfeffer’s perspective, it becomes clear that there was a failure to capitalize on an innovation.

• Westerly overlooked that she was inherently challenging the status quo of the sales reps and failed to establish the political will and power before communicating and implementing her proposal.
• The situation that Westerly found herself in was extremely political: there is a moderate interdependence between the field consultants who sell the software and those that come up with the product — Westerly’s unit.
• Looking at the responses from the sales reps there is obviously a wide variety of different opinions and the importance of the issue is quite substantial as it deals with how to allocate the scarce resource of time.

What sources of power could Jess Westerly have benefited from?

The ability to control resources like budgets or positions was not in her authority. After all, the greatest resource control in that sense would have the development unit, who implements the product that Westerly’s unit conceptualizes and that the field consultants have to sell.

As a new member to the company, Westerly’s control over and access to information is somewhat limited as well. As an isolated individual that is conducting analyses in the product unit her connectedness and closeness are limited.

But there are two things she could have done:

1. introduce an incremental resource to the sales operations by arguing for hiring more consultants or
2. Functioning as a broker between the sales reps and the development team to increase her betweenness and thus gain power.

Fleming & Spicer further allow us to understand where power is located in Kauflauf GmbH.

One could describe the development team as exercising episodic coercion over the entire organization. That unit has the ultimate authority to decide which products from the CRM unit get implemented and which custom solutions can be offered to prospects that the sales reps talk to.

In another perspective one could associate the strong response from the field consultants to Westerly’s proposal as a systemic subjectification in Kauflauf GmbH as they are articulating a discourse that attempts to shape and reinforce identities within the organization to make individuals like Westerly behave in the vested interests of the firm or the sales reps.

On the other hand, Pfeffer and Fleming & Spicer are of little help when it comes to providing concrete and feasible recommendations for individuals like Westerly to establish a power base and play the political game to implement her ideas.

Introducing incremental resources or increasing betweenness takes time and changing coercive power dynamics can seldom be achieved by one individual that was recently hired into an assistant role.

The only feasible way to implement her proposal would therefore be to rely on human interaction. Westerly should have spent time building a coalition with sales reps. Starting out small by building on insights from people that actually would have to implement a proposal would allow Westerly to make a case and provide social proof.

Instead of introducing herself in an email, she should have invested some time in getting to know the people she needs to cooperate to establish a foundation for liking and reciprocity.

Finally, I think the entire strategic framing of her email fails to capture on consistency and scarcity. She does not create a sense of urgency, nor builds on previous commitments that the sales reps have made.

In another case, Caroline Regis did not understand the political dynamics that evolved after a merger of Excel Systems and Gemini.

She had gained experience in various roles at Excel and developed an expertise as VP of manufacturing. As part of the merger, the outsourcing strategy that Gemini had been running was meant to replace the in-house manufacturing that Excel was known for.

Regis herself tried to argue for keeping in-house manufacturing and felt betrayed when the decision was made for outsourcing.

In a conversation with Excel’s CFO, Regis learned that in reality, there was a power struggle between the previous Excel CEO Ron Whitney, who now became chairman, and Roger Dreanan in the position of CEO. Dreanan tried to utilize the outsourcing decision to increase control of the company. Although Whitney opposed the decision, he did not want to fight against Dreanan for such a minor issue.

Adopting Fleming & Spicer’s perspective, we can certainly observe a power struggle about the domination over the organization. This process is driven by the individual interests of Whitney, and Dreanan, but also external shareholders, who want to define the future direction of the company. Both actors also engage in manipulation over the firm, as they are utilizing informal ties to set an agenda of political issues that can or cannot be discussed.

Looking at Pfeffer, we can learn that the political climate of the merger indicates that the direction of the firm is an issue of importance. However, in these disruptive organizational situations, Pfeffer’s resource perspective and argument for task independence or location networks falls short in explaining how power is actually gained and distributed.

What we can observe, on the other hand, is a game that is played using psychological moves. In that sense, Regis is not an active player in this game, which would of course make it harder to use persuasion to gain power.

Although she should consider thinking about the principles of liking and social proof to assess the political climate, perhaps it is ultimately a question of game theory to understand the environment she is part of.

But the fact that she threatens to resign even though she had just learned about the politics in the situation, shows that she is not adept at understanding these situations and playing the game.

John Clendenin can certainly be seen as more adept at playing the political game, but especially at using persuasion to gain power.

He found an underutilized resource in the Multinational Development Centre at Xerox, and turned it into an irreplaceable unit, solving critical problems for the organization.

Building on Pfeffer here, Clendenin succeeded in enhancing the power of his unit by being involved in many operational areas of the firm, creating consensus among his staff and therefore speaking as one voice. The fact that he managed to develop their own coding language allowed him to secure access and control over this scarce resource.

He also received incremental resources as he continuously introduced new staff into his unit and secured budget increases. In the words of Fleming & Spicer, he used coercion in organizations to manifest his power.

Whether consciously or not, Clendenin was skillful at using persuasion to gain followers, create a strong unit and accrue power. Inside his team he especially capitalized on the principles of liking and reciprocity, by praising and challenging his subordinates and creating obligations for returning favours.

He succeeded in creating a succinct identity of his unit, reaching consensus among a wide range of individuals, using principles like social proof and consistency.

Our ambivalence with influence obviously raises the question here if he was not just manipulating people. While that is of course a personal assessment, I think that the answer to that depends on the objective — and as with power as well — if it is abused or not.

Conclusion

All organizations are political entities and to understand them you need to look at organizational politics. We have learned that to play the political game, one needs power.

Power is most often defined over resources or information, but it can also be in being adept at playing strategic games. To gain power in the first place, I think it is necessary to be adept at persuasion.

You need the ability to convince people of your idea to build a powerful coalition or obtain resources.

What Pfeffer, Fleming & Spicer, nor Cialdini explain is why individuals like Clendenin act in such a way. What is their intrinsic motivation? What drives them to gain power?

This could be a valuable complement to extant literature on influence, power and organizational politics.

References

Arendt, H. (1970). On violence. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Bennis, W., & Nanus, B. (1985). The strategies for taking charge. Leaders, New York: Harper. Row.

Cialdini, R. B. (2001). Harnessing the science of persuasion. Harvard Business Review, 79(9), 72–81.

Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2014). Power in management and organization science. The Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 237–298.

Pfeffer, J. (1994). Managing with power: Politics and influence in organizations. Harvard Business Press.