Nine Generic Influence Tactics
1. Rational persuasion. Trying to convince someone with reason, logic, or facts.
2. Inspirational appeals. Trying to build enthusiasm by appealing to others’ emotions, ideals, or values.
3. Consultation. Getting others to participate in planning, making decisions, and changes.
4. Ingratiation. Getting someone in a good mood prior to making a request; being friendly, helpful, and using praise or flattery.
5. Personal appeals. Referring to friendship and loyalty when making a request.
6. Exchange. Making express or implied promises and trading favors.
7. Coalition tactics. Getting others to support your effort to persuade someone.
8. Pressure. Demanding compliance or using intimidation or threats.
9. Legitimating tactics. Basing a request on one’s authority or right, organizational rules or policies, or express or implied support from superiors.6 first five influence tactics—rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, consultation, ingratiation, and personal appeals—soft tactics
Exchange, coalition, pressure, and legitimating tactics accordingly are called hard tactics because they involve more overt pressure.
3 Influence Outcomes
1. Commitment. Your friend enthusiastically agrees and will demonstrate initiative and persistence while completing the assignment.
2. Compliance. Your friend grudgingly complies and will need prodding to satisfy minimum requirements.
3. Resistance. Your friend will say no, make excuses, stall, or put up an argument.9
Social power – ability to get things done with human, informational, and material resources.
Socialized power -Directed at helping others.
Personalized power - Directed at helping oneself.
Five Bases of Power
Reward power - Obtaining compliance with promised or actual rewards.
Coercive power - Obtaining compliance through threatened or actual punishment.
Legitimate power - Obtaining compliance through formal authority.
Personal – derived from one’s personal characteristics, relationship with others, and behavior towards others.
Expert power - Obtaining compliance through one’s knowledge or information.
Referent power - Obtaining compliance through charisma or personal attraction.
Barriers to Delegation include:
Belief in the fallacy “if you want something done right, do it yourself”
Lack of confidence/trust in lower levels
Low self-confidence
Fear of being called lazy
Vague job definition
Fear of competition from those below
Reluctance to take risks involved in depending on others
Lack of controls that provide early warning of problems with delegated duties
Poor example set by bosses who do not delegate
Sources of Uncertainty (uncertainty triggers political behavior):
1) Unclear objectives
2) Vague performance measures
3) Ill-defined decision processes
4) Strong individual or group competition
5) Any type of change
Participative Management – the process whereby employees play a direct role in setting goals, making decisions, solving problems, and making changes in the organization.
Lewin’s Change Model suggests that there are three stages to planned change –
The first stage is unfreezing where leaders create the motivation to change.
The second step is changing when employees are provided with the information and tools to adjust or modify their way of doing things.
The final stage is refreezing which happens once the change becomes a normal part of daily operations.
John Kotter eight steps for leading organizational change -
The first step begins with establishing a sense of urgency – unfreeze the organization by creating a compelling reason for why change is needed.
The second step is creating the guiding coalition or team – create a cross-functional, cross-level group of people with enough power to lead the change.
The third step is developing a change vision and strategy – create a vision and strategic plan to guide the change process.
The fourth step is communicating the change vision to individuals within the organization – create