As leadership is an act of influence, if you don’t have power then you can’t influence. If you can’t influence then you can’t be a leader.
Power has been defined as the ability to get someone to do something they would not otherwise have done (Morgan 1997). In other words, power is about the capacity to influence others, while influence is concerned with producing desired behavioural or psychological effects in another person.
A person’s power is determined by two factors: personal attributes and position characteristics. Personal power is your source for influencing and leading. Positional power is related to your role and is your power for managing.
Each of these attributes are within your direct and personal control. So even if you don’t have ‘positional power’, that is, are not very senior in your workplace, you still have the capacity to exert influence by harnessing your personal power. This is why ‘pure’ forms of leadership are more often seen at lower levels of organisations rather than in more senior roles.
On the other hand, if your position has power (eg the CEO), then people will be following you because of your position, not necessarily because of who you are as a person.
Whether you have ‘positional power’ depends on where you sit in your organisation. It’s called ‘positional power’ because the power does not belong to you; it belongs to the role. If you were to leave the role, you wouldn’t take the power with you, it would be left there for the next person to take up.
To exert influence and lead, you must have a clear understanding of which sources of power are available to you. And for the process of leadership to develop, you can now start thinking about which sources of power you already have and which sources you would like to cultivate.
When it comes to transforming power into influence, some approaches are more suitable to management positions where you can draw on the power of your position, while others require personal power.
At times there may be situational constraints that prevent you from exerting influence in the workplace. For example, you may be too busy or lack the freedom or opportunity to persuade others because of your particular role.
Corporate or national cultures may also favour one approach over another. In countries or organisations that place great value on formal authority, influencing upwards may be very difficult. Likewise, if you’re seeking to influence someone to do something outside of their job but that’s in your interest, the organisation may inhibit your pursuit of personal goals.
Role constraint is also problematic in jobs that are very clearly defined because there may not be the scope to influence someone to do something that‘s even slightly outside of their position description.
Understanding the relationship between power and influence
When it comes to transforming power into influence, there are a number of other factors to consider, including what place in an organisation’s hierarchy the person you are seeking to influence occupies.
| | Superior | Peer | Subordinate | Organisation |
|---|
| Rational persuasion | X | X | X | - |
| Apprising | - | - | - | - |
| Inspirational appeals | X | X | X | - |
| Consultation | X | X | X | - |
| Collaboration | X | X | X | - |
| Ingratiation | - | - | - | - |
| Personal appeals | Depends on nature of relationship | Depends on nature of relationship | Depends on nature of relationship | - |
| Exchange | - | - | - | - |
| Coalition tactics | - | - | - | X |
| Legitimating tactics | - | - | - | - |
| Pressure | - | X | X | - |
As you can see in this table, some approaches are more suited to different roles or levels in an organisation than others. For example, if you’re seeking to influence an entire organisation, you’ll need a coalition. However, to influence peers, subordinate or superiors, rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, collaboration and consultation are proven to work more effectively than other approaches (Robbins & Judge 2013).
By selectively applying these approaches to a given situation or organisational context, you’re more likely to gain others’ commitment, as opposed to just compliance. Conversely, pressure only works if you have some degree of positional power over the other party (which makes this more of a managerial rather than leadership approach).
Apprising, ingratiation and exchange approaches have some degree of success with peers and subordinates, although, once again, these are not as effective as techniques that aim for commitment rather than compliance. Personal appeals can be effective in many circumstances, but largely depend on your personal power and specific relationships with colleagues (Robbins & Judge 2013).
What you should also be aware of is something called ‘countervailing’ influence, which refers to how people respond—and resist attempts—to being influenced.
Other factors to be aware of
As individuals we often have mental shortcuts that make us susceptible to responding to influencing attempts without us even realising. These mental shortcuts are challenging to overcome, but being aware of them means you can make sure that when you’re being influenced by someone it’s because they’re putting forward a suitable case as opposed to your mental programming playing tricks on you.
Reciprocity
For example, the implicit belief of ‘reciprocity’ means that we often comply with an influence attempt due to the unstated assumption that if we do something for this person, at some point the favour will be returned. It’s therefore important to check whether this is an assumption you hold, and make it a point of conversation if you believe that your relationship is one of mutual reciprocity, otherwise you may find yourself in unwanted debts and exchanges.
Commitment and consistency
There’s also the implicit belief of ‘commitment and consistency’, which means that because we want to appear committed and consistent to the people we work with, we may be influenced to do something because of these reasons rather than the merits of the case being put forward.
Social proof
Similarly, there’s the assumption of ‘social proof’ where we’re more likely to engage in behaviour if the person who is influencing us also behaves that way. We often work on this unacknowledged assumption when we’re eating out; that is, we’re more likely to choose a café or restaurant that’s full rather than one that’s empty.
We’re also swayed more by people we ‘like.’ You’ll like people you encounter frequently, who are physically attractive, similar, give compliments, and who you associate with positive events. ‘Authority’ and ‘status cues’ such as obvious signs of wealth, also influence us, both intentionally and unintentionally.
Scarcity
A final factor to be aware of is ‘scarcity’; namely, the belief that things that are in short supply are somehow intrinsically ‘better’ than those that are widely available. For example, if we see a sign that says ‘sale ends 31 July’ and it’s 29 July, we’re more likely to rush in to buy something before the sale ends.
Individual differences
Who we are as individuals impacts how we see leadership, how we act as leaders, the ways in which we try to influence others and how we act as followers.
There are many factors that determine different ways of viewing leadership. The first group relates to biographical characteristics such as age, race, gender, religion, relationship status, work experience and current role. These characteristics all impact on our approach to leadership.
Apart from biographical characteristics, other factors include ability, attitude, personality, and perception.
Ability
Ability refers to an individual’s capacity to perform a range of mental or physical tasks (Ivancevitch & Matteson 2002). Intellectual ability can be broken down into numerical aptitude, verbal comprehension, perceptual speed cues, and inductive reasoning (Robbins & Judge 2013). Emotional intelligence is also regarded as an ability an area explored in more detail in the ‘Leadership Challenges’ course.
Attitudes
Attitudes also influence our approach to leadership. Attitudes are evaluative statements or judgments in relation to objects, people or events. They reflect how we feel about situations (Robbins & Judge 2013) and are important for both leadership and management. If you have a favourable attitude towards the organisation and your job, you’re more likely to be effective (Ivancevich & Matteson 2002).
Personality
Personality is another factor that plays a role in our approach to leadership. Personality is defined as a relatively stable set of characteristics, tendencies, and temperaments that have been significantly formed by inheritance and by social, cultural, and environmental factors (Robbins & Judge 2013).
The
Big Five Personality Model is one of the more popular frameworks for rating an individual’s personality. This rating is calculated according to five key factors.
- Extroversion
- Emotional stability
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
- Openness to experience.
Perception
The fifth and final way in which individuals are distinguished is through perception. It is this fifth group that we’ll focus on in this activity since being aware of our own and others’ perceptions is key for leadership success, even though it’s often overlooked.
According to Robbins & Judge (2013), perception is a complicated cognitive process involving:
- receiving stimuli from what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell
- mentally organising stimuli
- interpreting organised stimuli to influence behaviour and form attitudes.
As individuals, we select specific cues that influence our perceptions. For example, have you noticed that some people have ‘an eye for detail’ or pick up on more subtle details in communication? These people are considered more ‘perceptive’ than those who don’t see these details.
Of course, there are times when the way stimuli is organised and interpreted can result in ‘misperception’ because it’s been received in a way that was unintended. For example, a study conducted by Rensis Likert in 1961 on supervisor-subordinate relationships found, for the first time, that a supervisor’s intention may be received very differently by a subordinate.
In this study, Likert found that attempts by supervisors to provide recognition to subordinates was not always perceived as such by subordinates. This table illustrates they types of recognition provided by supervisors versus the percentage of subordinates that actually perceived this as recognition.
| Recognition type | Supervisors | Subordinates |
|---|
| Gives privileges | 52% | 14% |
| Gives > responsibility | 48 | 10 |
| Gives a pat on the back | 82 | 13 |
| Gives sincere praise | 80 | 14 |
| Trains for better jobs | 64 | 9 |
| Gives > interesting work | 51 | 3 |
Table adapted from Likert (1961, p. 91).
Perception is reality
There are many factors that influence perceptions. In this step we discuss attributions, stereotypes and selective perception and projection.
Attribution
When we attempt to make sense of a situation or a person’s behaviour, we attribute meaning or cause, often without knowing the full circumstances. For example, think about a time when your boss was in a bad mood; was this because your boss is a bad-tempered person or because something bad happened?
Attribution theory is concerned with ‘how and why ordinary people explain events as they do’ (McLeod 2010). We might explain events because of personal (internal) or situational (external) factors.
For example, let’s say you go to a work meeting and at the end you leave feeling that it didn’t go well. Your reaction might not be based on the content of the meeting, but rather on your personal feelings about who attended or situational factors such as the technology not working as required.
The direction and strength of our attributions are determined by ‘distinctiveness’ ‘consistency’ and ‘consensus’ (Robbins & Judge 2013). Our mental processing patterns often mean that we:
- mentally focus on stimuli that is distinctive; that is, different and unique
- often sort information so that it’s consistent with what we already think, believe and assume
- strive for consensus, leading us to perceive things in a way that is commensurate with what other people believe or what is the more popular viewpoint (Robbins and Judge 2013).
We can also have distorted attributions such as the ‘fundamental attribution error’ where we put too much emphasis on the individual and not enough on the external circumstances that influence the situation (Harman 1999).
Interestingly, we tend to attribute meaning to external factors in relation to ourselves (something outside of our control), whereas we tend to attribute internal factors (such as personality) to others’ behaviour (Harman 1999).
For instance, can you recall a time when you have attributed meaning to a colleague’s behaviour that turned out to be incorrect? It might be that a colleague snubbed you and you thought it meant they didn’t like you, when in fact they were highly distracted by a pressing family situation.
This is similar to ‘self-serving bias’ where we take credit for positive things but attribute negative factors to something not belonging to us or outside of our control.
As you interact with others this week, try to be aware of those times you attribute personal or situational meaning to their behaviour.
Stereotypes
Stereotyping is defined as ‘a fixed, over generalised belief about a particular group or class of people’ (Cardwell & Marcouse 1996).
There are both advantages and disadvantages to stereotyping:
One advantage is that it enables us to respond rapidly to situations because we may have had a similar experience before. One disadvantage is that it makes us ignore differences between individuals; therefore we think things about people that might not be true (ie make generalisations). (McLeod 2015, para. 1)
Thus, stereotyping can lead to inaccuracies and negative consequences.
An associated factor is perceptual bias, which is the lens we automatically filter all of our experiences through. Imagine you’re walking through a busy shopping area and you hear a child cry. The way you interpret that cry will depend on your previous experiences. You might think that the child is tired, hurt or manipulating their parents by behaving in a way that is sure to cause embarrassment.
We can minimise perceptual bias by:
- knowing that stereotyping can occur with very little information
- staying open to new information
- recognising that stereotypes rarely apply to a specific individual.
Selective perception and projection
Selective perception is the act of selectively interpreting what you see based on your own interests, background, experience and attitudes, whereas selective projection is attributing one’s own characteristics to other people.
The fact that we all see the world differently for many different reasons means that we’ll all have different interpretations of leaders and leadership. This is why it’s impossible to find ‘one best way’ of leading since, due to the way we as individuals see the world, even when we are exposed to the same stimuli and information, we have the innate capacity to view and interpret it differently.
Managing perceptions as a leader
People can be at the same place, at the same time and still come away with different opinions about what actually happened and, because everyone perceives the world in different ways, each person thinks that their version of events is correct.
As a leader, it’s important to be aware of your own perceptual biases and shortcuts. However, as difficult as these may be to overcome, you can always mitigate their impacts by being aware of how bias informs your perceptions and avoid jumping to conclusions.
What does this mean for you as a leader?
In terms of effective leadership, recognising the impact of bias is extremely important as perceptual errors can lead to poor decision-making. This means you can never truly understand others if you don’t start by developing your own self-awareness.
Developing self-awareness
To better understand yourself and others, it’s important to be aware that there are a number of sources of perceptual error, including:
- not collecting enough information
- using irrelevant information
- seeing only what we want and expect to see
- allowing early information to affect perception of later information
- allowing one’s own characteristics to affect the way we perceive others
- accepting stereotypes uncritically.
Addressing your perceptual bias
If you’re serious about developing your leadership practice, in addition to increasing your awareness of potential perceptual bias, you also need to know how you can address these errors. For example, according to Huczynski & Buchanan (1991), you may need to:
- avoiding making quick judgements about people and events
- collect and consciously use more information about people and events before arriving at decisions
- develop self-awareness by not only understanding your own personal bias, but also the biases of others.
This last point is complex but incredibly important to understanding leadership and your role as leader. Since people perceive things differently, the people you work with—despite you being the same person—will perceive you in different ways. Understanding how they see you and why, is key to developing your leadership effectiveness.
Addressing the perceptual bias of others
There is a school of thought that says you should adapt and be flexible to the needs of your followers, but—if they all have different perceptions and vast individual differences of their own—how can you achieve this without compromising yourself? This is a key question that requires addressing in further courses on this subject.
Revisiting leadership in practiceThis week we’ve addressed how leadership is defined and how it can be practiced, which goes directly to answering the big question at the foundation of this course: what is leadership?
Here Andrea sums up the main points for you to takeaway and start applying in your own leadership practice.
Power and influence
Leadership is defined as the process of influencing a group of people towards a common goal. To influence people we must use our power.
Managers have positional power, that is, the role they inhabit comes with power. However, it’s possible to change your role to one in which you can draw more deeply from your existing sources of power or acquire new ones.
The difference between management and leadership
This is where we draw a line between management and leadership (and there’s lots of material available that discusses this). For example, leaders are visionary and propel change, whereas managers strive to maintain the status quo.
A simpler way to understand whether you’re leading or managing is to think about which sources of power you use. If you’re using personal power such as expertise and charisma, it’s likely you’re practicing leadership rather than management. However, the line between management and leadership isn’t always clear, which is something we’ll discuss at greater length in subsequent courses.
Approaches to leadership
To practice leadership, there are a number of different influence techniques you can use. To decide which one is most appropriate, think about everything else involved in the leadership process: followers, goals, and the context or situation in which leadership is practiced. Some techniques will be better suited to certain people and situations than others, so do your homework and choose wisely.
Understanding individual differences
This homework involves a greater understanding of not just yourself (the potential leader), but also your potential followers. Because we all have unique backgrounds and histories, our individual differences shape how we behave and enact leadership in the workplace. There are various ways in which we’re different (eg our demographic characteristics and personality), but these aren’t things we can do a lot about.
The role of perception
What will be incredibly useful for you and how you practice leadership will be a greater awareness of perceptions, both in terms of how you perceive the environment around you and how others may have a different view.
We’ll always have different ways of viewing the world and we should appreciate that; indeed, as leaders we must always strive to find a balance between treating people equitably while recognising difference.
Our perceptions become problematic when we don’t make the effort to work beyond our perceptual shortcuts or seek out more and different types of communication, and ensure that, as leaders, our perceptions aren’t leading to poor decision-making.
We all have the potential to be blind to important information and issues, so, to ensure that leadership in our workplaces is as effective and sustainable as possible, we have a duty to ourselves .
