The context of interunit influence attempts - includes appendix

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 1993  by Christopher Gresov,  Carroll Stephens

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1967 Organization and Environment. Boston: Harvard Business School, Division of Research.

March, James G., and Herbert A. Simon

1958 Organizations. New York: Wiley.

McClelland, David

1961 The Achieving Society. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.

The central question that this research addresses is Under what conditions do work units attempt to influence the design or operations of other work units? Influence attempts are one of several possible avenues for coordinating and managing a given unit's relationships with other units. These avenues consist of behaviors that range from extremely reactive, such as designing or adjusting unit behavior to external directives or constraints, to extremely proactive, such as attempting to modify external directives or constraints to fit existing unit behavior. Interunit influence attempts fall, by definition, on the proactive end of this range. While previous research has for the most part focused on reactive behavior, our knowledge of organization will be incomplete without more understanding of the conditions under which unit members behave proactively to influence the design of the other units.

In attempting to understand proactive unit behavior, we confront the interplay between design and politics in organizational life. Influence is the ability of a person or group to change the behavior of another (Dahl, 1970); attempts to change the design or operations of other units are, by their very nature, instances of interunit politics. Interunit politics has been viewed as a mechanism by which those units that control critical contingencies influence the organization as a whole toward adaptation to a changing environment (e.g., Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). Alternatively, politics has often been conceptualized as illegitimate behavior that interferes with the smooth functioning of the organization, subverting progress toward organizational goals and replacing them with parochial interests (e.g., Mintzberg, 1983).

Our concern with the proactive and potentially political aspects of unit organizing is based on a view of organizational systems that Gouldner (1970: 215-216) referred to as "functional autonomy." In this view, systems are defined as groups of autonomous elements whose connectedness is problematic. Traditionally, theorists have treated adaptation to the environment as a single problem solved by the organization as a whole. In contrast, we view adaptation as an ongoing process of mutual adjustment between semiautonomous parts; the adaptation of each part presents a contextual problem to the adaptation of other parts.

Thus, the aspect of organizing addressed in this research is the ongoing attempts of units to influence the design and operations of related units, those other units whose design adaptations constitute a contextual problem for the focal unit. Specifically, we explore influence attempts by units that are horizontally linked in peer-related sets. We do not address behavior that is sporadic, erratic, and evoked only by specific issues or decisions, which some scholars contend makes up a considerable portion of political behavior (e.g., Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978; Pfeffer, 1981). In keeping with our approach, we confine our theoretical predictions to influence behaviors consisting of repetitive social actions that, we believe, constitute elements of a strategy for adaptation to the unit's functional and political environment.

Research has neglected interunit influence attempts as a design strategy, and interunit politics in general is not well understood. Politics has been hypothesized to be the inevitable result of functional differentiation (March and Simon, 1958), decentralization (Pfeffer, 1981), centralization (Eisenhardt and Bourgeois, 1988), organic structure in subunits (House, 1989), or a plethora of needs, attitudes, and dispositions at the individual level as these find expression or frustration in organizational arrangements (McClelland, 1961; Mintzberg, 1983; House, 1989; Ferris, Russ, and Fandt, 1990). No empirical work has tested these explanations against each other; no one knows, for example, the relative importance to political engagement of the organizational context of a unit versus its internal structure.

In contrast with open systems explanations that focus purely on the environment or closed system approaches that consider only internal structure, this paper develops a cross-level model. Influence behavior is a relational phenomenon; consequently, we argue that it is a function of both organizational factors that affect interunit interaction generally and other lateral relationships that constitute its immediate context. This cross-level approach provides greater specificity to a number of explanations extant in the theoretical literature (e.g., Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978; Pfeffer, 1981) that refer to political behavior in general.

Background

Influence activity within organizations takes place in an arena that is largely defined by the design of the organization and the relationships between constituent parts that this design implies. Organizational members have interests and drives that, under some conditions, will find expression in influence activity, and such interests are defined, crystallized, or at least influenced to a great extent by members' parochial affiliations with organizational units. A challenge for theorists doing research in the areas of organization and work-unit design is to set forth the conditions under which organizational units and their members are more or less likely to engage in influence activity.