Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [95]
More than 20 years ago, Paul Hirsch, now a business school professor at Northwestern, wrote a book titled Pack Your Own Parachute, suggesting that managers be less loyal to their companies and adopt free-agent thinking.10 To survive in the new world of work, managers needed to be visible, marketable, and, above all, mobile. The idea of an economy employing free agents has a sometimes overly rosy and unrealistic view of the upside potential of having to fend for oneself. It also doesn’t fully acknowledge the economic and psychological risks of being employed when you can be fired “at will,” for any or no reason at all.
So don’t worry about how your efforts to build your path to power are affecting your employer, because your employer is probably not worrying about you. Neither are your coworkers or “partners,” if you happen to have any—they are undoubtedly thinking about your usefulness to them, and you will be gone, if they can manage it, when you are no longer of use. You need to take care of yourself and use whatever means you have to do so—after all, that has been the message of companies and business pundits for years. Take those admonitions seriously.
POWER AND HIERARCHY ARE UBIQUITOUS
Holding aside the fact that you are probably in an environment where survival of the fittest—the most politically skilled—prevails, even if you wanted to avoid the organizational politics, I don’t think it is possible. I have had entrepreneurs tell me they wanted to created businesses free of organizational power dynamics, but there is evidence that suggests this is impossible. So the original question posed at the beginning of this chapter—“Is all of this political behavior good for the organization?”—may be irrelevant because these processes are ubiquitous in social interaction.
At some intuitive level, we understand the inevitability of organizational politics. Management researchers Jeffrey Gandz and Victor Murray surveyed 428 managers working in a variety of companies about their opinions of organizational power dynamics. Some 93 percent expressed strong or moderate agreement with the statement, “The existence of workplace politics is common to most organizations,” and 89 percent agreed with the statement, “Successful executives must be good politicians.” More than three-quarters agreed with the statement, “The higher you go in organizations, the more political the climate becomes,” and about 85 percent thought that powerful executives acted politically.11
One of the reasons why power moves and political dynamics are so common is that hierarchy is ubiquitous in animal societies—even among fish! As soon as hierarchy exists, it is natural to want to move up and avoid being at the bottom. Consequently, there are contests for dominance among all animals that travel or congregate in groups. This includes people. In human interaction, even in the absence of formal organizational arrangements, job titles, and differences in resource endowments, differentiation arises among individuals as they interact.12 Informal leaders with more influence emerge even if groups are just engaged in pleasurable social interaction such as discussing a book or going on an outing. Research evidence also suggests that the larger the group or organization, the greater the degree of differentiation, including hierarchical differentiation, will be. Therefore, hierarchy will be prevalent in larger collectivities such as many work organizations.13 Even though organizations vary in the extent to which they attempt to practice shared leadership and the people in specific leadership roles change over time, all organizations create hierarchies and the very existence of hierarchy means that there will be competition for who occupies higher-status positions.
It’s too bad that