MGT2382 Module 8 Learning Journal: Power, Influence, and How Work Really Gets Moved

Course: MGT2382 Organizational Behaviour

Module: Module 8 – Power and Influence

Calendar week: June 30–July 6, 2026

Category suggestion: MGT2382 Learning Journal / Field Lab: Learning Journals

Phase lens: Phase 0 warning lights, Phase 1 impact, and Phase 3 rebuilding systems. Power becomes most visible when responsibility, authority, information, and consequences are distributed unevenly.

Source note: This reflection examines organizational power, the contingencies that strengthen power, social networks and social capital, influence tactics, countervailing power, organizational politics, and the ethical responsibility attached to influencing other people.

Reader’s Moment

You have probably worked somewhere where the person with the highest title was not necessarily the person with the most influence. The organizational chart said one thing, but the workplace itself said something else. A supervisor may have held formal authority, while an experienced employee controlled the information, relationships, routines, or practical knowledge required to keep the operation moving.

You may also have seen someone with no management title become the person everyone consulted before accepting a change. That person might have possessed expertise, credibility, relationships, or enough social support to influence how others responded. Management could issue the instruction, but the informal leader could determine whether the instruction gained commitment, reluctant compliance, or quiet resistance.

That is where Module 8 lands for me. Power is not confined to titles, policies, or formal lines of authority. Power exists wherever someone has the capacity to affect another person’s decisions, behaviour, opportunities, access to information, or ability to complete the work.

The problem is not that power exists. Organizations could not function without some distribution of authority and influence. The problem begins when power is hidden, denied, separated from accountability, or used to transfer the cost of a decision onto people who had little ability to influence it.

Power Is a Capacity, Not a Character Trait

Power refers to the capacity of a person, team, or organization to influence others. The word often carries a negative meaning because people associate power with domination, coercion, privilege, or abuse. Those associations are understandable, but power itself is not automatically ethical or unethical. It is a capacity. The ethical question is how that capacity is acquired, exercised, restrained, and reviewed.

A manager may use power to protect an employee from harassment, secure resources for an understaffed team, enforce a safety requirement, or clarify an uncertain role. The same manager could use power to silence concerns, hide information, reward loyalty over competence, or punish someone for making an inconvenient problem visible.

The authority may be the same in both situations. What changes is the purpose, method, transparency, and distribution of consequences.

The useful question is not simply, “Who has power?” It is, “What is this power being used to produce, and who is carrying the cost?”

The Main Sources of Power

Module 8 describes several sources of organizational power. These sources often overlap, and a person may hold several at the same time.

• Legitimate power: Authority attached to an accepted position or role. Employees generally accept that a supervisor can assign work, establish priorities, and evaluate performance within the limits of that role.
• Reward power: The ability to provide something valued, such as pay, recognition, preferred assignments, advancement, scheduling flexibility, training, or access to opportunities.
• Coercive power: The ability to apply punishment or remove something valued. This may include discipline, undesirable assignments, loss of privileges, reduced hours, exclusion, or termination.
• Expert power: Influence arising from knowledge, ability, experience, or specialized competence that other people need or respect.
• Referent power: Influence created through identification, trust, admiration, credibility, or a sense that the person represents values others want to support.
• Information power: Influence created through access to information, control over communication channels, or the ability to interpret information that others cannot readily access or understand.

Formal organizations tend to emphasize legitimate, reward, and coercive power because these are connected to authority. In practice, expert, referent, and information power may be equally important. A manager may be able to order a change, but an experienced frontline worker may know whether the change can actually work.

This creates an important leadership lesson. A title can produce compliance, but it cannot guarantee commitment. Employees may do what they have been ordered to do while withholding judgment, creativity, discretionary effort, or trust. Commitment is more likely when legitimate authority is supported by competence, fairness, communication, and credibility.

When Formal Authority and Real Influence Separate

The separation between authority and influence explains why some leaders struggle despite holding senior positions. They possess the formal right to make decisions, but they have not developed the credibility, knowledge, relationships, or trust needed to move people beyond minimum compliance.

The opposite can also occur. An employee may have enormous practical influence without carrying the formal responsibility attached to leadership. They may become the person who trains new employees, interprets instructions, solves recurring problems, calms conflict, fills communication gaps, and keeps the operation functioning. The organization depends on this person but may never formally recognize the role or provide matching authority.

This is familiar territory for Standing on the Ledge: responsibility without authority.

Responsibility without authority is not empowerment. It is often load transfer. The organization receives the benefit of informal leadership while leaving the individual exposed when something goes wrong. The person is expected to influence outcomes but may have no formal ability to allocate resources, correct behaviour, reject unreasonable demands, or establish enforceable boundaries.

The Contingencies of Power

Possessing a valued resource does not automatically create equal power in every situation. Several conditions determine how strongly a source of power can influence others.

Substitutability

Power increases when the person, resource, skill, or relationship is difficult to replace. A worker with unique knowledge may possess considerable power because the organization cannot easily substitute someone else. That power weakens when the knowledge is documented, shared, or available from several sources.

This creates a tension. Organizations need expertise, but they become fragile when expertise is allowed to become a private kingdom. The answer is not to devalue skilled people. It is to recognize expertise while building enough knowledge sharing that the operation does not depend entirely on one gatekeeper.

Centrality

Power increases when a person or work unit sits at the centre of important workflows. Someone who connects departments, controls a critical handoff, maintains essential equipment, schedules the workforce, or communicates with a major customer may influence much more than their title suggests.

Centrality also explains why the loss of one apparently ordinary employee can suddenly expose how much invisible coordination that person was performing. The job description may have looked narrow while the actual role held several parts of the system together.

Discretion

Power grows when someone has freedom to decide how a resource, rule, or process will be applied. Two supervisors may hold the same title, but the supervisor with greater control over scheduling, assignments, discipline, information, or interpretation of policy possesses more practical power.

Discretion is not automatically harmful. Workplaces need judgment. The danger appears when discretion is broad but standards are unclear. Employees may then experience different rules depending on personal relationships, management preference, or whether they are seen as useful to those above them.

Visibility

Power also depends on whether other people recognize the person’s contribution, authority, or access to resources. Invisible work may be essential without producing much influence because decision-makers do not see it. Meanwhile, highly visible work can create a stronger reputation even when it contributes less to the actual operation.

This matters because organizations often reward what is easiest to see rather than what is most necessary. The worker preventing problems may receive less recognition than the person visibly responding after those problems become emergencies.

Countervailing Power: Keeping Authority in Check

Countervailing power is the ability of another person or group to restrain, challenge, or balance someone who holds authority. It may come from a union, health and safety committee, regulatory body, professional association, board, experienced management group, employee coalition, or public accountability process.

Countervailing power is not automatically obstruction. In a healthy system, it prevents authority from becoming absolute. It gives people a lawful or legitimate way to question decisions, expose risk, demand evidence, and require those exercising power to explain themselves.

A workplace without any meaningful countervailing power may appear efficient because decisions move quickly. That appearance can be misleading. Silence is not the same as agreement, and the absence of visible opposition does not prove that a decision is safe, ethical, or supported.

When employees believe that speaking honestly will damage their employment, formal consultation may become theatre. People attend meetings, answer surveys, and nod at presentations while protecting themselves through silence. The organization can then claim that employees were consulted even though their input was never capable of changing the outcome.

Social Networks and Social Capital

Power also develops through relationships. Social networks connect people to information, resources, advice, emotional support, decision-makers, and opportunities. Social capital refers to the value available through those relationships: trust, cooperation, goodwill, credibility, access, and the willingness to share resources.

A leader with healthy social capital does not need to rely entirely on commands. People are more willing to listen because the relationship already contains trust. Departments cooperate because they have established working connections. Information moves because people believe it will be handled responsibly.

Social capital can make an organization more responsive, but it can also reproduce exclusion. The same network that helps insiders cooperate may become an “old boys’ club” that keeps outsiders away from information, opportunity, and influence. People may be evaluated less by the quality of their work than by whether they are known, liked, connected, or considered part of the right circle.

This is why inclusion cannot be reduced to inviting different people into the room. They must also have access to the relationships, information, credibility, and decision channels that make participation meaningful.

Structural Holes and the Power of the Connector

A structural hole exists when two people or groups could benefit from one another but are not directly connected. Someone who bridges that gap may become highly influential because information and resources move through them.

This person may act as a connector between management and frontline workers, between departments, or between an organization and an outside community. That role can create enormous value. The connector may identify problems early, translate different perspectives, prevent duplication, or bring together people who possess different parts of a solution.

The same position can become unhealthy when the connector controls the gap instead of bridging it. Information may be filtered, delayed, softened, or selectively distributed. The connector becomes a gatekeeper, and others remain dependent because direct relationships are discouraged.

A healthy connector builds roads. An unhealthy gatekeeper collects tolls.

The Norm of Reciprocity

Relationships are also influenced by the norm of reciprocity: the expectation that assistance, favours, loyalty, or support will eventually be returned. Reciprocity can strengthen trust and cooperation. People help one another because they believe the relationship will remain balanced over time.

However, reciprocity can also create obligations that distort judgment. A person may feel pressure to support a proposal, remain silent, overlook poor behaviour, or return a favour because someone previously helped them. What looks like voluntary cooperation may carry an unspoken debt.

The ethical dividing line is whether the exchange remains transparent and whether the person is free to disagree without retaliation. A favour should not become ownership.

Influence Tactics: How Power Becomes Behaviour

Power is the capacity to influence. Influence tactics are the actual methods people use to change another person’s attitudes or behaviour. These tactics range from dialogue and persuasion to pressure and control.

Silent Authority

Silent authority occurs when someone complies because they accept the other person’s legitimate role. The manager does not need to threaten or explain every routine instruction. The existing authority relationship is enough.

This can make work efficient, but silent authority depends on the request remaining within the accepted boundaries of the role. Authority begins losing legitimacy when it is used inconsistently, personally, or outside its reasonable scope.

Assertiveness

Assertiveness involves directly requesting, demanding, confronting, or repeatedly reminding someone to act. Clear assertiveness can be useful when expectations have been ignored or safety is involved. It becomes pressure when the purpose is to overwhelm resistance rather than address the substance of the concern.

Information Control

Information control influences people by deciding what they know, when they know it, and how the situation is framed. Some information must legitimately remain confidential. However, selective disclosure can also be used to manufacture agreement by preventing people from seeing alternatives, risks, or consequences.

Logic cannot repair corrupted inputs. A decision may appear rational while being built on information deliberately arranged to produce a preferred answer.

Coalition Formation

A coalition is a group that combines its influence to support or oppose an outcome. Coalitions can help people with limited individual power raise legitimate concerns. They can also become political weapons that isolate employees, create camps, or substitute group pressure for evidence.

Upward Appeal

Upward appeal involves invoking the support of someone higher in the hierarchy. This may be appropriate when a problem exceeds the person’s authority or when a lower-level decision violates policy. It becomes manipulative when higher authority is used mainly to intimidate someone who has raised a reasonable concern.

Persuasion

Persuasion uses evidence, reasoning, explanation, or values to encourage agreement. It generally respects the other person’s ability to evaluate the argument. Persuasion becomes manipulation when important information is withheld or when emotional pressure is disguised as objective reasoning.

Impression Management

Impression management involves shaping how other people perceive us. Some impression management is normal. Employees explain their accomplishments, leaders try to appear confident, and organizations present their work in a favourable way.

The problem begins when maintaining the image becomes more important than reporting reality. A workplace can become so committed to appearing successful that bad news is treated as disloyalty. The organization then protects the impression while the underlying conditions continue to deteriorate.

Exchange

Exchange offers benefits, support, or cooperation in return for another person’s assistance. A fair exchange can help people coordinate resources and priorities. An unethical exchange creates hidden obligations, rewards personal loyalty with organizational resources, or pressures someone to trade away a legitimate concern.

Commitment, Compliance, and Resistance

Influence does not produce only one type of response. It may create commitment, compliance, or resistance.

• Commitment: The person genuinely supports the decision and invests effort in making it work.
• Compliance: The person follows the instruction but does not necessarily believe in it or contribute beyond what is required.
• Resistance: The person opposes, delays, avoids, challenges, or attempts to undermine the request.

Organizations sometimes confuse compliance with commitment because both may produce immediate obedience. The difference appears later. Compliant employees do what they must. Committed employees bring judgment, initiative, creativity, and discretionary effort.

Hard tactics may produce rapid compliance, but repeated reliance on pressure can damage trust and increase long-term resistance. Softer tactics are not automatically ethical, but consultation, honest persuasion, and meaningful collaboration are more likely to preserve agency and build commitment.

Organizational Politics

Organizational politics refers to behaviour intended to influence decisions or the distribution of resources in ways that may place personal or group interests ahead of broader organizational goals. Politics can include managing impressions, attacking or blaming others, controlling information, forming coalitions, cultivating networks, and creating obligations.

Politics is difficult to eliminate because organizations contain limited resources, competing goals, unequal authority, and people with different interests. Some political skill may even help useful ideas gain support. The question is whether political activity helps the organization confront reality or helps individuals protect their position from reality.

Politics becomes destructive when truth matters less than proximity to power. Information is hoarded. Accountability becomes selective. Employees learn that raising a concern is more dangerous than causing the problem. Decisions are defended according to who made them rather than whether they worked.

The result is not only frustration. Employees exposed to persistent workplace politics may experience lower job satisfaction, weaker commitment, greater stress, reduced citizenship behaviour, and a stronger desire to leave.

Conditions That Allow Politics to Thrive

Organizational politics becomes more likely when resources are scarce, decisions are ambiguous, roles are unclear, performance standards are subjective, communication is weak, and trust is low. Major organizational change can intensify politics because people become uncertain about status, employment, resources, and future authority.

Personal characteristics also matter. People with strongly Machiavellian values may be more willing to manipulate relationships or information for personal benefit. A high need for power can produce constructive leadership when disciplined by ethics, but it can become destructive when status and control become goals in themselves.

The organization still shapes whether those tendencies succeed. A political employee can cause damage, but a workplace that rewards manipulation, protects favourites, and punishes transparency creates the conditions in which political behaviour becomes a successful strategy.

Culture is not only what an organization says it values. Culture is also the behaviour that repeatedly works.

Reducing Harmful Organizational Politics

Organizational politics cannot be removed through a poster asking employees to be respectful. The structure must make manipulation less useful and transparency more useful.

• Clarify roles, responsibilities, authority, and decision rights.
• Use understandable and consistent performance standards.
• Explain how resources, assignments, promotions, and opportunities are allocated.
• Prevent essential information from being controlled by one person or informal group.
• Create safe channels for disagreement and reporting concerns.
• Apply standards upward as well as downward.
• Investigate problems before assigning blame.
• Reward knowledge sharing rather than information hoarding.
• Ensure consultation is capable of changing a decision.
• Address leaders whose conduct supports intimidation, retaliation, or selective accountability.

Leaders model the political climate. When leaders manipulate information, protect favourites, or punish disagreement, employees learn that politics is part of survival. When leaders admit mistakes, explain decisions, distribute information fairly, and tolerate evidence-based challenge, they make honest behaviour safer.

Servant Leadership: Power Under Discipline

Servant leadership treats power as stewardship rather than possession. The leader still holds authority, makes decisions, sets standards, and addresses misconduct. Service does not require passivity. It requires the leader to understand that authority exists for the health of the work and the people carrying it, not merely for the leader’s convenience or status.

A servant leader develops other people instead of manufacturing dependence. They share knowledge, build capability, listen before deciding, and accept responsibility for the conditions created by their leadership.

The strongest leader is not the one who proves that nobody can function without them. The strongest leader builds a system that can continue functioning because people have knowledge, judgment, resources, and clear authority.

Managing Up Without Surrendering Honesty

Managing up means understanding a supervisor’s priorities, communicating clearly, providing useful information, anticipating needs, and bringing possible solutions. Practiced honestly, it helps leaders make better decisions and reduces unnecessary friction.

At its worst, managing up becomes flattery, avoidance, or an effort to make every problem sound harmless enough that authority never has to become uncomfortable. Employees may learn to soften bad news, hide risk, or tell leaders only what they appear willing to hear.

That may protect the employee temporarily, but it weakens the decision process. Leaders cannot correct conditions they are prevented from seeing. Managing up should improve the flow of reality, not decorate it.

A Power Map From the Ledge

Module 8 adds another practical tool to the Standing on the Ledge framework: the power map. When a workplace situation becomes confusing, it helps to look beyond the organizational chart and identify how influence is actually moving.

• Who has the formal authority to say yes or no?
• Who controls the information needed to make the decision?
• Who possesses expertise that others cannot easily replace?
• Who sits at the centre of the workflow or relationships?
• Who can reward, punish, include, or exclude?
• Who influences the group without holding a formal title?
• Who can challenge the decision safely?
• Who appears to be consulted but cannot actually affect the outcome?
• Who receives the benefit of the decision?
• Who carries the risk, workload, or consequences?

This is not paranoia. It is structural awareness. A person cannot understand a conflict, failed decision, or organizational breakdown without examining the distribution of power around it.

People often blame themselves for being unable to repair situations they never possessed the authority to change. A power map separates personal failure from structural limitation. It also reveals where agency still exists and where countervailing support may be needed.

Questions I Am Carrying Forward

• Does the person with formal authority also possess the knowledge required to use it responsibly?
• Who holds the most influence when the formal leader is not present?
• Is expertise being respected, exploited, or turned into an excuse for organizational dependence?
• Who has responsibility without enough authority, information, or resources?
• Would this use of power remain defensible if it were made completely visible?
• Are employees being persuaded, consulted, pressured, or merely informed after the decision has already been made?
• Is silence being interpreted as agreement when it may actually represent fear or learned helplessness?
• Does the workplace reward people who share information or people who control it?
• Are social networks connecting the organization or creating protected circles of insiders?
• Is a coalition raising a legitimate concern or using numbers to avoid evidence?
• Does countervailing power exist, and can it be used without retaliation?
• Are standards applied consistently regardless of status?
• Is impression management helping people understand the work or helping the organization hide from it?
• Who benefits from the current political environment?
• What behaviour has the organization taught employees is necessary for survival?

Closing Reflection

The main lesson I take from Module 8 is that power should be visible enough to be accountable. Hidden power creates confusion. Unchecked power creates fear. Denied power creates a kind of organizational unreality in which employees can feel the pressure being applied while being told that nothing unusual is happening.

A healthy organization does not eliminate power. It disciplines power. It connects authority to responsibility, influence to transparency, expertise to knowledge sharing, politics to organizational purpose, and leadership to service.

Power can coordinate work, protect people, move good ideas, enforce necessary standards, and create the conditions for employees to succeed. It can also distort information, silence dissent, reward loyalty over truth, and place consequences on people who had no meaningful voice in the decision.

That is where this module meets Standing on the Ledge. Collapse does not always begin with one dramatic event. Sometimes it begins through the steady accumulation of decisions made by people who hold power while the cost is carried by people who do not.

The answer is not to pretend power can disappear. The answer is to name it, map it, question it, balance it, and insist that those who exercise it remain answerable for what it produces.

Evidence before shame. Structure before blame. Authority with responsibility. Power under daylight.

Godspeed.

Field Card

• One receipt: Power is not automatically abusive, but power without transparency or accountability becomes dangerous quickly.
• One next step: When influence is being used, identify who benefits, who carries the cost, and whether the tactic respects the other person’s agency.
• One boundary sentence: “I can respect legitimate authority without pretending that every use of authority is ethical.”

References

Algonquin College. (2026). Module 8: Power and influence. MGT2382 Organizational Behaviour course material.

McShane, S. L., & Warner, M. A. (2024). Canadian organizational behaviour (12th Canadian ed.). McGraw Hill.