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8 - A tale of two theories: Implicit theories of power and power-sharing in organizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2010

By
Peter T. Coleman
Edited by
Dean Tjosvold  and
Barbara Wisse
Dean Tjosvold
Affiliation:
Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Barbara Wisse
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
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Summary

In an attempt to avoid layoffs at a company in the United States, a large majority of the employees agreed to cut their own salaries by 20 percent. The offer was rejected by the CEO, who chose instead to fire 20 percent of the workforce. He said “it was very important that management's prerogative to manage as it saw fit not be compromised by sentimental human considerations”

(Harvey 1989: 275)

Why would any CEO ever choose to share his or her power? Why would he or she withhold it? Do the ways managers think about power, how they conceive of its nature and the assumptions they make about how it operates in organizations affect their willingness to empower others? And what are the conditions that make it more or less likely that people will share power? These are the central questions addressed in this chapter.

Starting with the early studies of participative leadership by Lewin et al. (1939) and Coch and French (1948), scholars have been investigating the organizational consequences of power-sharing. Since that time, the benefits of power-sharing in organizations and the conditions under which it tends to be most effective, have been well documented (Likert 1967; Vroom and Jago 1988, 2007; Walls 1990; Argyris 1964; McGregor 1960; Bradford and Cohen 1984; Kanter 1983; Peters and Austin 1985; Peters and Waterman 1982; Hollander and Offermann 1990; Yukl 1994; Tjosvold 1981, 1985a, 1985b; Stewart and Barrick 2000).

Type
Chapter
Information
Power and Interdependence in Organizations , pp. 133 - 150
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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