Busm1094 - Power and Resistance - Short Essay

Essay Question: Write an individual short essay on the contribution that critical analysis of power and resistance makes to your understanding of individual and organisational behaviour, and how this knowledge will guide your actions as an employee or leader/manager.

Understanding how each channel of the organisational hierarchy behaves is a key skill to possess in order to develop as both an individual and a member of the workforce. Analysing how members in an organisation who occupy authority exhibit power can help us understand how manipulation and control shape contemporary businesses. There are four faces of power that outline different aspects of domination in organisations, and provide insight that explains the rationale behind managerial decision-making. Likewise with power, the resistance exemplified by employees and the like to organisational change involves its own framework to explain certain behaviours. Having critically analysed the fundamentals behind power and resistance in organisational behaviour allows one to fathom concepts of direct authority and psychodynamics (Olsen, 1990).

Power in organisations is not restricted to the act of managers demonstrating their authority to their subordinates. Whilst coercion and manipulation can be argued to be the most apparent and observable faces of power, how one’s views are construed to shape a different underlying attitude and political outlook on work can covertly be attributed to power. Coercions notion of ‘A getting B to do something B would never do otherwise’ (Dahl, 1957), as well as Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz investigation of the mobilisation of bias (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962) to theorise about manipulation were the first two identified faces of power. Steven Lukes theorised about a different mode of power, a version that represses, constrains and prohibits certain ideas in one’s subconscious. This ideology was described as an insidious exercise of power (Lukes, 1974) as it resulted in...