Position paper: power, politics, and culture; Develop your position paper, addre
ID: 366144 • Letter: P
Question
Position paper: power, politics, and culture; Develop your position paper, addressing the following components: 1) Influence of Politics and Power. Explain how politics and power-play may have influenced the organization's culture of Wal-Mart. 2) Sources of Power. Explore the sources of power and describe how management could use this influence to benefit your department and improve organizational performance. 3) Leadership Behavior and Culture; Make recommendations that support how the study of power and politics could influence leadership behavior and improve the organizational culture. 4) Leadership Influence; Discuss the importance and complexity of leadership behavior. How does it influence organizational structure and performance?; 5) Executive Summary; Prepare and executive summary that presents your recomendations for the ways in which the organization could build a strong culture.
Explanation / Answer
Answer –
Influence of Power, Politics, and Culture on organization –An organization is generally influenced by Power, Politics and Culture. These are the three key factors which have strong influence on the organization; these three can change the direction or behavior of organization’s operations. Let us discuss the influence of these factors on the organizations as below.
1) Influence of Politics and Power. Wal-Mart has utilized power and politics for influencing their employees for setting their mind for achieving the desired objective and goal of the Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is an known retail market player who explored power and politics for influencing people for achieving their targets. Politics is nothing but exploring power and power is nothing but using it for influencing others. Hence Politics and Power both are being utilized by people for setting the air and getting the desired work done. Generally the use of power and politics is for exploiting people or using people for business needs without providing the genuine compensation to the people. Generally it is common understanding in the world that politics and power has always been used by stronger people over weak people for fulfilling their purpose.
2) Sources of Power. There are basically five type of power which can be grouped into two categories such as organizational power and personal power. These powers can be used by management to benefit the department and achieve the organizational performance.
a. Organizational Power – Legitimate Type, Reward Type and Coercive Type.
b. Personal Power – Expert Type and Referent Type
So these powers are utilized in the organization for fulfilling the objective and goals of the organization. The latest name of power coming now days is empowerment – it means empowering people to get the work done.
3) Leadership Behavior and Culture; Power and politics could influence leadership behavior and improve the organizational culture. The power and politics could change the behavior of leadership as they new that they have power and politics support to influence the employees and they can influence the outside market as well. This can help the organization to influence their suppliers and also to some extent their customers also. So this will be an easy task for the leadership to achieve their desired objective as they can utilize politics and power for achieving their targets. They can take any action which can meet their target and at same time they will not have any impact as they have power and support from politics. The culture is changed accordingly and the culture’s nature is like power driven culture in the organization.
4) Leadership Influence; Discuss the importance and complexity of leadership behavior. How does it influence organizational structure and performance?;
Leadership behavior is very important and it is very complex in nature. The leadership behavior is basically the originator of cultue development in the organization. If the leadership’s behavior is moral and ethical , then the culture of organization will also be meeting ethical standard and people will feels that they have good place and good environment to work in. If the leadership behavior is not appropriate and do not support right things in the organization, then the culture will also be not appropriate and the employees will feels that the environment of the organization is not appropriate for working.
So the culture of organization is purely depends upon the leadership behavior. Leadership behavior is complex also as many time situations are arise where it is difficult to maintain the ethical standards, but nature of decision depends upon the genuineness of leadership.
We recommend maintaining the high level of ethics in the organization so that it will help to develop great moral among.