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Power Dynamics: Good for Organizations, Good for You?

THIS BOOK has been about creating your path to power and, even if you don’t want a lot of power, figuring out how to survive the organizational dynamics you will almost certainly experience. Which raises the question I am often asked: “Is all of this political behavior good for the organization, even if it is good for me and my career?”

At first glance, this concern about political behavior in organizations seems justified. One dominant perspective in the research literature on organizations is that “politics is associated with the ‘dark side’ of workplace behaviour and researchers have described political behaviour as inherently divisive, stressful, and a cause of dissent and reduced performance.”1 The empirical evidence supports this view. Higher levels of perceived politics inside organizations are associated with reduced job satisfaction, morale, and organizational commitment, and higher levels of perceived politics are also correlated with higher intentions to quit.2

But I’m not sure you should worry about the effect of your behavior on the organization, because there is lots of data to suggest that organizations don’t care very much about you. In the spring of 2009, VentureBeat reported that four partners were leaving the large and venerable venture capital firm Venrock.3 Tony Sun, a managing partner who had been at the firm for 30 years and over that time had made his partners literally billions of dollars, was going. So, too, was David Siminoff, who had joined Venrock only two years before to much fanfare because of his experience in the digital media space—he had been CEO of Spark Networks, which ran JDate, the Jewish dating cite, and had founded 4INFO, a leading mobile research service. Also leaving were Eric Copeland, who had been at Venrock for 11 years and who had a strong background in engineering with experience in digital communications technologies, and Rich Moran, a former senior Accenture consulting firm executive. Moran had been brought into Venrock after doing consulting work helping improve its decision processes and organizational dynamics.

Although the “official” story was that the departures were voluntary, they were not. Tony Sun was caught off guard by the request for him to step down. When he thought about resisting his ouster, he learned that the partners pushing for his removal had outmaneuvered him. They had already told the limited partners (investors) about the move and lined up their support. Moran, retained for a few months in the transitional role of executive in residence, was also caught off guard by his and the others’ ousters. When I asked him why he would be forced out given that he had just recently been brought into the firm to provide “adult supervision” to the ego-driven interpersonal dynamics, his insightful response was that people who were behaving badly didn’t want to be reminded of their bad behavior, even by having someone around with the responsibility for improving organizational processes.

It’s probably to be expected that at the senior levels in partnerships, people get pushed out in coups and revolts—something that happened even to Pete Peterson, the billionaire cofounder of Black-Rock, the money management firm, when he got into a power struggle with Lew Glucksman, who forced him out of his role as the leader of investment bank Lehman Brothers, at that time a partnership.4 When he was forced out in a power struggle at the large law firm Jones Day, government contracts lawyer Eldon Crowell took most of the Washington office with him as he founded Crowell and Moring.5 Numerous managing partners have been unceremoniously ousted from large accounting firms.6

The many involuntary departures at partnerships occur with particular frequency when times are tough. Research shows what common sense suggests is true: political struggles are more likely to occur and to be more fierce and power is used more often when resources are scarcer and therefore