Discuss about the Organizational Behavior, Power, and Politics.
Organizational behavior is determined by the way people interacted within groups. Understanding and managing human behavior is necessary for any organization to become more efficient and fruitful in business (Pinder 2014). This phenomenon holds importance as it determines the structure of the organization and further helps to figure out the way outer events can affect the organization. On the other hand, power and politics within organization is also of huge importance within any organization. The impact of power and politics depends on the negative or positive power the employees use to influence others (Chadwick 2017). I will be reflecting upon these two important issues power and politics within organization and metaphors for organizations and will discuss the implications these learnings has in my work ethics. Critical discussion of these learning with future implications will also be discussed.
In week 6, we learned about metaphors for organizations and according to it, organizations are open systems however, each person’s perspective makes it different from different angles. The learning demonstrates three examples of metaphors for organization such as organization as machines, brains and organism. The machine metaphor determines the integrity and interlocking bureaucracy, culture and clearly defines the role and responsibility within the organization (Örtenblad, Putnam and Trehan 2016). However, it lacks the human aspects, flexibility and pride. The second metaphor determines organization as adaptive and growing organism that focuses on surviving within competition, but the metaphor lacks harmony the stable structure. Further, the third metaphor, brain determines the organization as a controlled system or library and decision making as its supreme strength. However, conflicts within two strong thoughts became its biggest flaws (Gherardi et al. 2017). On the other hand, the week 7 learning helped me to understand the impact of power, politics and the way power should be divided within an organization. While learning about these topics, I understood that power and politics determines major role to mold the way one behaves within organization. Power is important for the organization as it is the potential ability to exert influence, but misuse of power leads entropy within organization. Therefore, higher authorities should be supportive and use logic and data to be forceful. Further, they should seek opinion from the employees and provide them with rewards and benefits to create an impression (Hsiung, Lin and Lin 2012). The week 6 learning made me understood that different metaphors explains an organization differently and understanding the real nature of it is difficult as every employee from higher or lower authority has different perspective about the organization and having a common idea is difficult.
The week 6 and 7 learning dealing with organizational behavior and power and politics have several strengths and weaknesses. Every individual has different perspective of understanding any organization. While, the metaphors of organization such as brain, machine and organism determines the organization as strong, comprehensive and controlled transmission system, it does not provide answers to my question (Hatch and Cunliffe 2013). The week 6 learning should be inclusive of an in-depth analysis about the metaphor, which can be applicable to the organization. Further, the comparative discussion of the metaphors such as brain, organism and machine, with the strength and limitations should be provided to us with practical examples. However, the learning helped me to understand the opportunities and challenges the metaphors present to increase the organizational understanding (Alvesson 2012). On the other hand, the week 7 topic, power and politics presented strongly the importance of these two aspects and mentions different forms of power such as domination, influence and authority. Further, interlink between power and politics was presented with two metaphors such as political system and instruments of domination. However, besides these strengths, the negative aspect of power was not mentioned and the positives of political aspects were not mentioned in the learning (Shafritz, Ott and Jang 2015).
These theories and learnings of week 6 and 7 helped me to understand the working scenario and ethics within my workplace. I understood the implication of power distribution within an organization and the way such distribution help the organization to control the employees, their feelings and their working ability. Within my organization, the unity within employees and the production determines the organization as machine, growth, competitiveness makes it organism, and decision-making ability represents it as brain (Hui 2013). However, the limitations of all these metaphors was clearly seen within the operations. This is because employees were unable to comply with the increasing working load as the organization was growing like an organism and workers were working like a machine and providing fixed amount of product (Burke 2017). Further, the higher authority were misusing their powers and did not provided the employees with incentives or rewards. Therefore, distribution of power was not following the company requirement. The power used by the authorities was not influential, as they never rewarded any employee for his /her performance. Therefore, from the learnings of week 6 and 7, I will be using both these aspects to make my future organizational experience a better one. As a part of the organization, I will be focusing on employee unity and flexibility, as these are the tools that help to restructure the faulty power distribution among higher authorities. If any power given, I will be using my power to influence others, through my actions or performance, so that everyone in the organization can utilize the opportunities given. On the other hand, I will seek the opinions of each employee and will try to understand their perspective or metaphor about the organization, so that proper steps could be taken, to overcome the limitations of those metaphors. Furthermore, I will try to understand the organizational politics and the limitations of the metaphors to implement work culture ethics within the organization. Employee empowerment, reward and recognition policy will be implemented to set meaningful goals, reinforcement of autonomy and self-efficacy with confident decision-making ability will be encouraged so that the power and political aspect cannot influence the employees to change their perspective about the organization
References
Alvesson, M., 2012. Understanding organizational culture, 2nd Edn., pp. 129-135, Sage. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=BDsV8eHp0_MC&oi=fnd&pg=PP2&dq=why+understanding+an+organization+with+one+metaphor+is+difficult+&ots=752m7qsHHG&sig=gNouXulTTr3v4xxP_UqfTmzMQMk#v=onepage&q=why%20understanding%20an%20organization%20with%20one%20metaphor%20is%20difficult&f=false
Burke, W.W., 2017. Organization change: Theory and practice, 5th Edn., pp. 128-135, Sage Publications. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=EWZCDgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=limitations+of+organism+metaphor+for+organization+&ots=KWOJNuIQd9&sig=djD1y7jBPMQWSZ8Q8aDrRu-Rxw4
Chadwick, A., 2017. The hybrid media system: Politics and power, 2nd Edn, pp. 23-44, Oxford University Press. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=AXAuDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=power+and+politics+in+organizations&ots=9b70dH7cn0&sig=aRSqHYQJqdG2HFvs45ojqjhsKVQ#v=onepage&q=power%20and%20politics%20in%20organizations&f=false
Gherardi, S., Gherardi, S., Jensen, K., Jensen, K., Nerland, M. and Nerland, M., 2017. Shadow organizing: a metaphor to explore organizing as intra-relating. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 12(1), pp.2-17.
Hatch, M.J. and Cunliffe, A.L., 2013. Organization theory: modern, symbolic and postmodern perspectives, 3rd Edn., pp. 145-156, Oxford university press. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=why+understanding+an+organization+with+one+metaphor+is+difficult+&ots=SmMd4YEEWu&sig=q4Oz6FcFcY6r2ESmhbgGzpnzRiM#v=onepage&q=why%20understanding%20an%20organization%20with%20one%20metaphor%20is%20difficult&f=false
Hsiung, H.H., Lin, C.W. and Lin, C.S., 2012. Nourishing or suppressing? The contradictory influences of perception of organizational politics on organizational citizenship behaviour. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85(2), pp.258-276.
Hui, W.T., 2013. Economic growth and inequality in Singapore: The case for a minimum wage. International Labour Review, 152(1), pp.107-123.
Örtenblad, A., Putnam, L.L. and Trehan, K., 2016. Beyond Morgan’s eight metaphors: Adding to and developing organization theory. human relations, 69(4), pp.875-889.
Pinder, C.C., 2014. Work motivation in organizational behavior, 2nd Edn, pp. 57-66, Psychology Press. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9RoKBAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=organizational+behavior&ots=alrKzTzHbA&sig=5eEyF1Gg8b3_F79KAEat9AJMY3E#v=onepage&q=organizational%20behavior&f=false
Shafritz, J.M., Ott, J.S. and Jang, Y.S., 2015. Classics of organization theory, 8th Edn, pp. 245-267, Cengage Learning. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=lOTrBQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=how+power+and+politics+in+organization+is+important&ots=wRGHioZJKX&sig=vv26hTTDHjQhih2km7VS0FHC8WU#v=onepage&q=how%20power%20and%20politics%20in%20organization%20is%20important&f=fals
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