Use Of Power In Organizations

Personal power is power that resides with an individual, regardless of his or her position in the organization. Someone usually exercise personal power through rational persuasion or by playing of followers identifications with him or her. An individual with personal power often can inspire greater loyalty and dedication in followers than someone who has only position power. The stronger influence from the fact that the followers are acting more from choice than from necessity and thus will respond more readily to request and appeals. Of course the influence of a leader who relies only on personal power is limited, because followers may freely decided not to accept his or her directives or orders.

The distinctions between formal and informal leaders are also related to position and personal power .A formal leader will have , at minimum, position power. And an informal leader will similarly have some degree of personal power. Just as a person may be both a formal and an informal leader, he or she can have both position and personal power simultaneously. Indeed such a combination usually has the greatest potential influence on the action of others. An individual with both personal and position power will have the strongest overall power. Likewise , an individual with neither personal nor position power will have the weakest overall power. Finally when either personal or position power is high but the other is low, the individual will have a moderate level or overall power.

The Uses of Power in Organizations

Power can be used in many ways in an organization. But because of the potential for its misuse and the concerns that it may engender, it is important that the mangers fully understand the dynamics of using power. In using expert power, managers aware of their education, experience, and accomplishments as they apply to current circumstances. But to maintain credibility , a leader should not pretend to know things that he or she really does not know. A leader whose pretension are exposed will rapidly lose expert power. A confident and decisive leader demonstrate a firm grasp of situations and takes charge when circumstances. Managers should also keep themselves informed about development related to tasks that are valuable to the organization and relevant to their expertise.

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A leader who recognizes employee concerns works to understand the underlying nature of these issues and takes appropriate steps to reassure subordinates. For e.g. , if employees feel threatened by rumors that they will lose office space after the next move, the leader might ask them about this concern and then find out just how much office space there will be and tell the subordinates, a leader should be careful not to flaunt expertise or behave like a he know everything.

Suppose a manager has asked subordinates to spend his day finishing an important report. Later, while the manager is out of the office, the manager boss comes and ask the subordinates to drop that project and work on something else. The subordinates will then be in the akward position of having to choose which of two higher-ranking individuals to obey. Exercising authority regularly wil reinforce its presence in the eyes of subordinates. Verifying compliances simply means that leaders should find out whether subordinates have carried out their request before giving rewards otherwise subordinates may not recognize the linkage between their performance and subsequent reward. The request that is to be rewarded must be both reasonable and feasible, of course, because even the promise of a reward will not motivate a subordinates who thinks a request should not or cannot be carried out.

The same can be said for a request that seems improper or unethical. Among other things, the follower may see a reward linked to an improper or ethical request. Finally if the leader promises a reward that subordinates know she or he cannot actually deliver , or if they have little use for a reward the manager can deliver, they will not be motivated to carry out the request. Further , they may grow sceptical of the leaders ability to deliver rewards that are worth something to them.

Bases of Power

Leaders are not automatically endowed an unlimited amount of power over subordinates . leaders also differ in terms of the sources of bases upon which power over subordinates can be exerted. There are five different powers that affect leadership which include expert power, referent power, legitimate power, reward power and coercive power.

The first base of power is labelled coercive power. The basis of the influence is the fact that one person can punish another. Thus , a subordinates may do what a leader request because the leader has the power to fire the subordinates. Although the threat of punishment may give a leader considerable power over subordinates ,coercive power generally is not a very efficient base of power.’

The second power base described by French and Raven is labelled reward power. This is essentially the opposite of coercive power. That is subordinates do what the leader wants because the leader has the ability to reward them in some way. For example, a subordinates may comply with a leader request that he or she work overtime because the leader has the power to grant this employee a larger pay increase when raised are given out.

The Third power base is labelled legimate power. This power emanates from the position that one holds in an organization. In most organization settings, the fact that one employee’s is another employee is another employees supervisor means that the supervisor has a legimate right to make request of the other person. Note that this legitimate right is independent of the person holding the position.

The Fourth power base is expert power. This is power based on the fact that an individual is perceived as an expert on something to ask a group of subordinates to work on a weekend may bring the group before making the request. When exchange is used as an influence tactics, the leader offers subordinates something in return for complying with the request, or perhaps offers them a share of the benefits that accrue when a task iis accomplished.

The fifth is Pressure. This involves the use of demands ,threats ,or persistent monitoring to make subordinates comply with a request . Suppose a supervisor wants to make sure a subordinates is on time every morning. One way to do this would be check the persons desk to see if he or she is present by the required time. Although pressure may at times get leader the behaviour they desire, this almost always comes in the form of compliance on the part of the employee.

Leadership

Good leaders are gifted, everyone can’t lead it . If you have the desire and willpower, you can become an effective leader. Good leaders develop through a never ending process, of self-study, education, training, and experience. To inspire the workers to a higher levels of teamwork, there are certain things to, know, . It do not come naturally, but when we acquired through continual work and study. Good leaders practices are continually works and studying to improve their leadership skills.

Before we get started, lets define leadership. Leadership is a process by which a person influences others, the objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent. The most popular definitions is that leadership is a quality of the persons possess that allows them to rule, and lead other people. That quality consists of a person’s charisma, power of thought, intellectual potential, organizational talents, and sense of responsibility.

Other leadership essays examples give a different definition: leadership is concrete knowledge of psychology and social interaction, anyone can certainly develop the ability to be a leader. We have seen someone ordinary leading a company or an organization. We have seen someone who is leading a country, but has no charisma, no special skills. There is little doubt you’ll answer “no”. We can give the example of Hitler whenever he gives the speech everyone claps he was just a amazing person but the secret is whenever he comes in the stage he used to practice in front of mirror .Unfortunately, there are so many people in our world who are in the top positions, who have influence and power, although nobody really sees a real leader in them. Perhaps being a leader simply means being in a position over other people.

Of course, their are some strategy to lead someone is to have the skills to make someone undertake what you want. Although it does not signify that this “someone” has no other solution. A real leader is someone who is respected by other people and due to this respect is followed by them. Being a leader demands something distinctive should be there in a person – something that makes him or her special, something stronger, and probably better than others so he compete with others. That’s why it’s not correct to think its virtually anyone can easily be a leader but not the perfect. Of course, to be a good one, we should improve our self, gain more and more practical knowledge as well as the experience, although with effort the leadership potential we can become a good leader.

The Power of Leadership

What is leadership? What is power? We define the two as a cornerstone of any successful team, organization, or for any successful country. If there to analyze the U.S. we could see this very clearly. The U.S. is the leader and one of the most dominating countries in the world, hence being called “world power”. What we estimate that leadership compliments from power, and power compliments leadership. When these two qualities are used in a responsible manner success soon and follows the right path . If we refer to the history books, we can come to the conclusion that wars are won by good leadership and a responsible use of power.

Whenever we mention the word “Power” most of the people will think that power is evil, corrupt, self-serving, manipulative and hurtful. When we used power is in an ethical and in purposeful way, there is nothing evil about it. Leadership is “interpersonal influence, exercised in a situation, and directed, through communication process ,and it is an attainment of a specified goal or goals.

If we would delegate responsibility to someone, we need to analyse that person with the power as well.

Managers and leaders always commit the mistake of giving people responsibility, and not giving them the actual power so that they can execute their responsibilities well.

How many people have we met that they are frustrated with their jobs simply because they had job responsibilities that they did not have much power to fulfil.

They try their very best, but they gave resigned or frustrated because they realize they simply do not have the better resources; decision making power; time to fulfill it.

In other words, they were given a task, but they were not given the resources to complete that task.

Leadership, power and influence is a theme within management or the organization that is constantly developing. Leaders are now a days developing new and innovative ways to empower themselves and the followers in order to get the best out of them they follow the leaders to become like him or her the advantage is that the work is done properly and the followers.

We have decided to look at the assumption that what leadership is based on,and the different types of relationships between the people, rather than the skills and abilities of just one person.

We know this theory allows for a large network of interaction of people from all walks of life, they have the ability to shape these people through the influence and power of the leader. So the objective was to examine the forms of power and the relationships of different power.

There are five sources of power that are commonly referred to when describing leadership.

The different approaches with supporting evidence gathered from successful leaders. They demonstrated the challenges experienced it face the reality and how they have overcome from the situation ,these obstacles through the use of leadership, power and influence. Different leadership patterns are applicable to different genders, while these behavioral strategies note above present unique solutions for men and women. It is believed that females as a rule would have softer leadership styles related to care, nurture and sensuality rather than to ruthless and aggressive search for the implementation of the corporate objectives. Females as a rule stress the importance of relationship while men stress the importance of a task. Still, there are many examples of task oriented females and caring males. Also it is believed that females in the organizations are likely to gain authority only if the company deals with people and relations rather than with some dry figures and statistics.

Leadership, as one can say involves the following four things –

• Motivating other people.
• Some leaders and some must be followers.
• The leaders comes front in time when needed or crisis and present innovative solution.
• Leaders know what they want, to achieve and what is their ambition.

The behavioural theory of leadership was created after the followers of the trait leadership theory could not find enough traits to explain why some people choose good leaders and why some could only be followers. The reason is the most logical way was to explore how the leaders behaved in their daily activities and especially towards their followers. The leadership would makes group of different behavioural patterns and activities together and then put a label on them calling them in styles.

Concern for task. This behaviour of leaders is represented by tangible and calculable achievement linked which improved productivity of the organization of labor and motivation the personnel.

Concern for people. This behaviour of leaders is represented by the tangible concern for people who works in the organization and have desire to establish proper relations rather than to treat them as units of production and corporate overhead. In this manner the leader establishes the group called the “old boy club” where each worker would become very much comfortable. Thus, if needed, each worker will give their best to do even more to make other ‘friends’ happy.

Directive leadership. This behavioural leadership style is represented by the leaders taking continuously and takes the decisions for other, and expecting the others rather to follow the instructions.

Participative leadership. This behavioural leadership style is represented by the leader’s goals to engage people make them busy to the task and increase their commitment by allowing them to make decisions for the company they work for.

As a rule the leadership would use any two of the four general leadership styles shown above, they redesign them or rename them, plot them on some graph and then establish mixed strategy. Many others leadership would use other combinations and plot other leadership styles and schemes based on the leadership behaviour.

Speaking about some practical situation, it is believed that those leaders engaged in participative and people-oriented leadership, they can enjoy better employee motivation and satisfaction leadership styles.

Conclusion

The power and bases of leadership is the day to day needs of human beings, and what i found while doing these assignment is Leader didn’t came in the earth by god gifted. They make them self to become a good leader the one who have desire to become a leader he or she should work on it, give effort, gain knowledge, and practically do some research so that he or she could lead others. The leader should have the quality to motivate others make himself the brand image so people follow him or her.It is not the easy task to lead a country or a followers the courage should be build on him/her so that he/she could utilize the power of the leader. He/she should have decision making abilities and he/she should take the decision which will give them fame .Finally i would like to conclude by saying that everything is possible if you have the goals.