Organizational Power and Politics

According to Slack and Parent the definition of power is the ability to get someone to do something they would not have otherwise done. Organizations include power within the individuals and within the organization itself. There are five main sources of individual power as stated in the text and they are: legitimate, reward, coercive, referent, and expert. To make an organization effective, many of these powers may need to work together. Now to explain each of the powers, first is the legitimate power, which is stated as exactly the same as authority. This power is given by the position of the person in the sport organization. They can expect compliance from all of their subordinates because of just their position title, when they ask for something to be done. This power only comes from the person position, not from any other skill that they may have. Second is the reward power, which is one person's control of one person's reward. This basically means that the person of control gives out a reward for the subordinates good work and by the person receiving a reward it makes them want to continue to work hard and get bigger and better rewards as they work. As Slack and Parent state, the larger the reward the greater the importance of the reward to the recipient. For example, in many professional players contracts they receive certain rewards for reaching certain goals for all the team. I have heard that certain players get more money if they hit a certain amount of home runs or even if they score a certain amount of touchdowns for their team. This makes them want to try harder and reach those goals for their management, so that they can be rewarded in the end. The third power is coercive. According to Slack and Parent, this is the power that is derived from the ability that one person has to punish another. I know that where I work, I get all my jobs done on time because I do not want to be "punished" for not completing my job. I personally do not think that this is the best approach for power because I do not like they way my work is run because of this approach, it makes the workplace stressful and does build up some anger towards management. This might work better in a sports organization because the players are getting paid much more money and they should have many more guidelines because they are representing a city, team and state. The fourth power is referent. According to Slack and Parent, this power is based on an individual's charisma and another person's identification with this quality. Basically, this power is for someone who identifies very strongly with a team or organization. They agree with all the values and concerns that their leader expresses and sends throughout the team or organization. The people that promote teams, event and sporting equipment are a great example of referent power. They identify themselves with the team. When they talk about the team they use the word we or us, to identify with them. The fifth and final power is expert. According to Slack and Parent this is a special knowledge or skill that a person has. They do not have to be high up in the organization to have the expert power. If they are the only person that specializes in that area at their organization they are going to have much more power than someone without that knowledge. For example, if a person knows how to operate a specific program in the organization to the max, then they are going to be the go to person for that program and they are going to have the most power for that specific aspect.