The Powers In The Company: Types And Forms Of Evaluation

  • Jul 26, 2021
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The Powers In The Company: Types And Forms Of Evaluation

The term "power" is considered by the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy as el domain, empire, faculty and jurisdiction that someone has to command or execute something. Thus, this power would include the ability or ability to force someone to behave in a certain way. way (Mulder, DeJong, Koppelaar & Verhage, 1986), or, as it is commonly said, getting your way in a situation Social. In this Psychology-Online article, we will talk about The Powers In The Company: Types And Forms Of Evaluation.

French and Bell (1996), after a review of the different definitions of power that can be found in the literature on Work Psychology, identify a series of elements common to all they. Thus power implies:

  1. get an effect (get away with it)
  2. occurs during a social interaction (two or more people)
  3. supposes the ability to influence others
  4. the results favor either party.
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Index

  1. Positive power and negative power
  2. Formal and informal power
  3. Personal and positional power
  4. How to get power
  5. Power assessment

Positive power and negative power.

A first classification of power within companies would be the one that distinguishes between positive power and negative power.

On the one hand, in the organization, the term power can be associated to activities such as guiding, influencing, persuading or selling, and even power can become constructive (Emans, Munduate, Klaver and Van de Vliert, 2003).

But power can also be associated with terms like force, oppress or coerce. Thus, in this scenario, power is ambivalent, although the positive face or collective power, as Roberts (1986) called it, is the one that prevails in companies, as various studies have shown in the face of the most negative face or competitive power (Roberts, 1986; Patchen, 1984). For example, problem-solving and consensus-building tactics are much more popular in companies than coercive tactics.

Formal and informal power.

Another classification of the different types of power derives from the Bifactorial theory of Social Power proposed by Meliá (Meliá and Peiró, 1984; Peiró and Melia, 2003). Here two fundamental types of power are distinguished: formal power and informal power.

Formal power refers to the control that a certain person has over the exchange of resources within the organization and is linked to hierarchical position that it occupies within said organization. This type of power is based on the ability to exchange scarce resources and is a vertical type of power, descending and also asymmetric, so that the more power a certain person X has over Y, the less power Y will have over X.

Against this, informal power is not necessarily linked to the formal structure of the company and it does derive more from the person's own sources; It can spread both vertically and horizontally and is of great interest since it is based on the positive aspect of relationships within the company having beneficial effects for the company. Thus, for example, positive relationships are anticipated between informal power and communication and contact between workers and negative relationships with conflicts, since that, the greater the communication, which is facilitated by this type of informal power, the fewer the conflicts and the easier the conflict resolution existing. Precisely, a fundamental area of ​​study within Industrial Psychology is related to conflict management within the organization.

Since conflicts, to a greater or lesser extent, are always going to be there, a primary interest is to prevent them from become detrimental to the organization and learn to solve them productively (Robbins, 1974).

Personal and positional power.

Whetten and Cameron (1991) identify two sources of power within organizations which are: a) personal power and b) the power of position.

The first would be related to the experience of the person, their personal attractiveness, effort and legitimacy.

On the other hand, the power of the position would have five different origins which are:

  • the position that the person has within an information and communication network;
  • the importance who has the job that that person does;
  • your degree of discretion at work;
  • the visibility that the work carried out by that person has in the face of influential people and
  • the degree of importance of homework with respect to the objectives of the company.
Powers In The Company: Types And Forms Of Evaluation - Personal Power And Position

How to get power.

On the other hand, Mintzberg (1985) distinguishes five possible sources of power within organizations, which are: the possibility of control a certain resource, control of a certain technical skill, knowledge of a specific area, legal prerogatives and finally, the worker's ability to access people who have power in any of the first four bases.

Thus, it is interesting not only to have power but also to have the ability to access people who have power, that is, the ability to relate to people who exercise power in any of the bases quoted.

However, when it comes to identifying the bases of power, it is the proposal by French and Raven (1959) that has achieved the greatest popularity. Despite the passage of time, these types of social power continue to be main players in any psychology manual. Industrial, and, also today, they continue to be elements from which to develop Development strategies Organizational. Specifically, these authors distinguish five types of power:

  1. Reward power. Based on the ability that a person has within the organization to administer positive incentives in order to achieve certain results or behaviors among employees.
  2. Coercive power. Based on the ability of a person to administer sanctions and punishments. That is, a person's ability to give something that a second person values ​​negatively.
  3. Legitimate power. Based on the belief that whoever possesses power has a legitimate right to exercise it and whoever receives the consequences of this power has a legitimate obligation to accept it. This type of power is backed by the organization's rules, which workers abide by.
  4. Referring power. It is based on the possession of certain traits that are valuable to other people. Thus, the person who receives the consequences of power feels an attraction or feeling of unity with respect to the person who is exercising power.
  5. Expert power. Based on the knowledge, experience or skills that the person with power has and that other members of the organization want.
  6. Another form of power proposed by these authors is situated within the power of the expert and is called informational power. This type of power is based on the possession of information, the ability to obtain and manage it. This type of power is very important in organizations since information is the raw material that is used in decision-making processes and has a great weight on the processes of influence.

Power assessment.

As has been pointed out, this last proposal has enjoyed great popularity, and the result of it has been the development of different instruments to evaluate each of these types of power within organizations. Specifically, three were the most popular scales used to evaluate the different types of power: the Student scale (1968), the Thamhain and Gemmill scale (1974) and the Batchman, Smith and Slesinger scale (1966), the latter being the most prominent.

However, years later, various authors pointed out psychometric deficiencies in these first scales (Rahim, 1988; Melia, Oliver and Tomas, 1993). Faced with this situation, in 1988 Rahim published his Rahim Inventory on the Power of the Leader (RLPI) which has been shown valid and with adequate psychometric properties in different studies (Hess and Wagner, 1999; Rahim and Magner, 1996). This inventory assesses the employee's perception of the power that a supervisor or leader possesses and is made up of a total of 29 items. Specifically, five items are used to assess coercive power and six for each of the remaining types of power proposed by French and Raven: reward, expert, referent and legitimate. The response scale of this inventory is of the Likert type with 5 response options where the higher values ​​represent a greater perception of power.

The following table proposes a reduced version of this scale and adapted to Spanish to evaluate the five power bases of French and Raven. This is made up of a total of 15 items (3 items for each dimension of power). For its application, with the intention of avoiding bias in the answers, it is advisable to present the items randomly

Powers In The Company: Types And Forms Of Evaluation - Power Evaluation

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to The Powers In The Company: Types And Forms Of Evaluation, we recommend that you enter our category of Management and business organization.

Bibliography

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