Assignment task:
For this project, you will examine and analyze the role of power and politics in organizations. As your textbook states, "you don't have to be a manager to have organizational power." Employees have varying degrees of personal power in different situations. An employee can be a leader utilizing seven bases of power.
1. Refer to Chapter 8, pp. 283-285 of your textbook and the following article on The Role of Power in Leadership, and then answer the questions below.
Choose one of the seven bases of power and describe someone you know who has used this base of power.
a) How did this person use this power to gain control or influence over others and/or resources?
b) Did the person have a positive or negative impact in the department and/or organization due to his/her use of the particular power? Explain.
2. Read up on the case study at the end of Chapter 8 called "Latoya Jefferson Use of Power and Politics" on page 304 and then answer the questions below: Latoya Jefferson is a tenured professor of business at a small teaching college in the Midwest. The Department of Business (DB) has nine faculty members; it is one of 10 departments in the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS). The business department chair is Beth Sweeny, who is in her first year as chair. Six faculty members, including Latoya, have been in the department for longer than Beth. She likes to have policies so that faculty members have guides for their behavior. On the collegewide level, there is no policy about the job of graduate assistants. Beth asked the dean of the SAS what the policy was. The dean stated that there is no policy, and he had spoken to the vice president for academic affairs. The vice president and the dean suggested letting the individual departments develop their own policy regarding what graduate assistants can and cannot do. So Beth put "use of graduate assistants" on the department meeting agenda. During the DB meeting, Beth asked for members' views on what graduate assistants should and should not be allowed to do. Beth was hoping that the department would come to a consensus on a policy. Latoya Jefferson was the only faculty member who was using graduate assistants to grade exams. All but one of the other faculty members spoke out against the use of having graduate assistants grade exams. Other faculty members believed it was the job of the professor to grade the exams. Latoya made a few statements in hopes of not having to correct her own exams. She stated that her exams were objective; thus, because there was a correct answer for each item on the exams, it was not necessary for her to personally correct the exams. She also pointed out that across the campus, and across the country, other faculty members were using graduate assistants to teach entire courses and to correct subjective papers and exams. Latoya stated that she did not think it would be fair to tell her that she could not use graduate assistants to grade objective exams when others could do so. She also stated that the department did not need to have a policy, and she requested that the department not set a policy. But Beth stated that she wanted a policy. She held a single minority view during the meeting. However, after the meeting, one other member of the department, Ted Brown, who had said nothing during the meeting, told Latoya that he agreed that it was not fair to deny her the use of a graduate assistant. There was no department consensus, as Beth hoped there would be. Beth said that she would draft a department policy, which would be discussed at a future DB meeting. The next day, Latoya sent a mermo to department members asking if it was ethical and legal to deny her the use of the same resources as others across the campus. She also stated that if the department set a policy stating that she could no longer use graduate assistants to correct objective exams, she would appeal the policy decision to the dean, the vice president, and the president.
a) What source of power does Beth have, and what type of power is she using during the meeting?
b) What source of power does Latoya have, and what type of power is she using during the meeting?
c) What would you do if you were Beth? List the possible steps.
d) If you were Latoya, knowing you had no verbal supporters during the meeting, would you have continued to defend your position or agreed to stop using a graduate assistant? Why? Justify your response.
e) Discuss the role of leadership in this case. Could Beth have used her leadership position more effectively to address the ethical issues and power dynamics at play? Explain.