Interpersonal Power

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Interpersonal Power

By Group 8

    Aditya Kranthi - PGP07.107

    Akash Guru      - PGP07.110

    Nitin Lala          - PGP07.134

    Tanmay             - PGP07.150

Introduction

From the interpersonal perspective, in a broader sense power has been considered as potential social influence or the ability to influence others to behave in line with our wishes (Boulding, 1999). In fact, Lewin defined it as the ability of inducing forces of a certain magnitude on another person (Lewin, 1935, p. 131) and French and Raven (1959) as the potential ability of an agent to influence a target within a context. French and Raven (1959) derived different kinds of resources a person might draw upon to exercise influence. They identified sources of social power: coercive, rewarding, legitimate, expert, referent and informational.

With reference to political ability the performance is a potential type of impact that collaborates with political ability to influence power appraisals. It has been proposed that ideal performance will probably be utilized into larger amounts of interpersonal power when people have greater amounts of political aptitude yet not for people lower in political ability. Besides, more elevated amounts of performance were not identified with power for people low in political ability [8]

Evaluation

1. Fetterman, A. K., Robinson, M. D., & Ode, S. (2015). Interpersonal arrogance and the incentive salience of power versus affiliation cues. European Journal of Personality, 29(1), 28-41.

In this paper, the authors have attempted to link motivation with interpersonal power, affiliation and arrogance. The authors argue that power is inherently competitive in nature whereas affiliation is not. People compete and vie for power and as such respond much more quickly to power cues than affiliation cues. However satisfaction is more in interpersonal affiliation. Interpersonal power is a never ending greed. People with power over others crave for even more power. Once a particular level of power is achieved, people vie for the next hierarchy of power. The authors have used circumplex [5] to find what kinds of people prefer power over affiliation. The circumplex model [5] encapsulates personality, social and clinical psychology. Further the authors discuss how interpersonal power comes hand in hand with interpersonal arrogance. Arrogance includes narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy [3], impulsivity, domineeringness and aggression [4] or honesty-humility [5] or deference and abasement [5]

Then the authors did three different studies relating interpersonal power with arrogance. In those studies, they have used probabilistic model to determine whether the choices made by participants were inherently power-biased or affiliation biased. They then analyzed the responses from both perspectives, giving an in-depth discussion of the correlations.

1. 1Peiró, J. M., & Meliá, J. L. (2003). Formal and Informal Interpersonal Power in Organisations: Testing a Bifactorial Model of Power in Role‐sets. Applied Psychology, 52(1), 14-35.

In this paper according to [14] position power originate from a person’s formal position and imply the legitimate authority to use positive and negative actions such as reward and coercion. Personal power refers to expertise, referent power and charisma of a person. Formal power is exercised in a top-down manner in an organisation. The superiors exhibit Formal power on their subordinates while the opposite cannot be done. Accordingly, it can be determined that a force specialist holding a higher various levelled position than that of the objective will hold more formal control over the objective than associates or subordinates. Informal power is based on constructive interpersonal relations, including the trading of social bolster, referent connections, or information, all socially valued unrestricted goods.

1. Treadway, D. C., Breland, J. W., Williams, L. M., Cho, J., Yang, J., & Ferris, G. R. (2013). Social influence and interpersonal power in organizations roles of performance and political skill in two studies. Journal of Management, 39(6), 1529-1553.

[13]  position on the flow of  imperative builds was that power mirrors the activity of impact, performance is an asset that can be utilized to add to one's energy, and political ability gives the adroit and expertise set to viably influence assets like execution and change them into force evaluations from others. Besides, he contended that political ability is one of the best instruments to get power in associations, through securing and utilizing data and assets, consequently suggesting a collaboration whereby political expertise takes into consideration the compelling bundling and presentation of execution, which deciphers into expanded force appraisals from others. It is accurately these untested thoughts that serve as the centre of the present two-study examination.

Implications:

A ferocious bid for interpersonal power among employees leads to immense competition and the constant attempt of one-upmanship over the other. This is actually not healthy competition and can as such lead to deep rooted feelings of inferiority complex thereby reducing performance of organizational group as a whole. To curb this, organizational behavior practitioners need to identify this at its earliest stage and act provide incentives. Organizational restructuring can help abate this problem. Organizational restructuring could in fact improve the overall productivity by keeping likeminded and similar power level people in the same hierarchy and group, thereby shielding the lower people from being directly by their power influence.

Position control generally alludes to the current hierarchical pecking order that renders administration the capacity to control the conduct of others and to change the authoritative structure and procedures. Then again, individual force alludes to power sources associated with specific capacities, abilities, and experience of a performer.

The political expertise of people in the work environment assumes a basic part in successfully utilizing their execution in profitable ways. As needs be, we contend that politically gifted people are more mindful of their execution, can present or transmit such execution in nonthreatening and compelling ways, and along these lines can understand expanded force evaluations from their key constituents as an aftereffect of their ideal execution presentation.