Exam 10: Power and Influence in the Workplace

A new employee in the finance department prominently displays diplomas and past awards indicating his financial expertise.What contingency of power is this person trying to increase?

Employees are losing their expert power as society moves from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy.

Employees have more expert power today than a few decades ago because:

Which of these actions would help persuade an employee to support your recommendation about the company introducing an on-site childcare facility?

Which of the following would potentially increase someone's power through non-substitutability?

Some employees and departments gain power by forecasting uncertainties in the organization's environment.

The most appropriate influence tactic depends in part on the influencer's power base and position in the organization.

Organizational politics typically involves:

Coping with uncertainty is an important source of power in organizational settings.Identify two jobs in your university that have power because they cope with uncertainty.Be sure to discuss the reasons why this power exists.

Supervisors who use ingratiation and impression management tactics tend to lose the respect of their staff.

_______ is part of a larger influence tactic called _______.

Women have difficulty getting into senior management because they are usually excluded from male networks.

The preferred influence tactics vary across cultures.

Extreme forms of assertiveness include blackmailing colleagues.

Even though you should be visiting clients most of the time,you make a point of stopping by the office each day so your boss sees that you are working.This increases your power by increasing your centrality.

Which of these statements about legitimate power is FALSE?

Advanced Systems Ltd.(ASL),a high-technology company with 20,000 employees,has just acquired LiteForce Ltd.,a 5,000-person company where you work as a photonics (fibre optics)engineer.ASL mainly acquired LiteForce to reduce its competitive threat in the marketplace,as well as to increase the number of engineers and researchers in lightwave technology.You and five other engineers and scientists at LiteForce were working on new technology that would dramatically improve lightwave transmission to communicate data across the Internet.Your team's discovery occurred just before the acquisition and was not well known in the organization.Also,the key executives who strongly supported your team's research have left the company through generous buyout packages during the acquisition.(ASL offered share options to encourage you and other engineers and researchers to remain.)The result is that only your team members and a few other people are aware of the potential benefits of the project.Your team has similar education and experience as many other engineers in the combined organization.Moreover,your team's authority is limited to expenditure within the existing project budget,which ends in a few months.Further support would require executive approval.Describe the sources and contingencies of power that you and your team have in this situation to continue the project.

Legitimate power is created whenever the organization assigns a supervisor formal authority over subordinates.

Which source of power tends to produce compliance or resistance,but not commitment,to the requested behaviour?

A software engineer was able to get placed into a group working on the most critical part of a new software program.She also made a habit of arriving at work around 5 a.m.,knowing that some of the top corporate leaders would arrive that early once in a while.This software engineer's actions increased her power mainly through: