The Management of Power

Paul G. Swingle

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351173223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This volume, first published in 1976, is addressed to the analysis of power and conflict in and of organizations. The author's organizing concept is that one can understand and harness or alter the energy of organizations so that they may function more intelligently and humanely. In focusing on the harnessing of organizational energy, the author relates theory to practical day-to-day reality in organizations and provides an in-depth analysis of the origins of conflict in organizations. The focus is upon the collective of power and action, and the volume offers pragmatic suggestions for enhancing managerial skills by bringing together theory and an appreciation of practical realities.

1

Introduction

In the early 1960s, when the United States had unconstitutionally restricted world travel for its citizens, a group of 80 or so American students traveled illegally to Cuba. Cuba lies 90 miles off of the Florida coast but the students had to travel over 14,000 miles, via Czechoslovakia, to get there. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the model of most of our organizations of today. To go 90 miles one must travel 14,000 miles.

This is a book about the science of the future—management. Organizations are a fact of life. They are here to stay. They are inevitable and society cannot survive without them. That many, if not most, present-day organizations are gerontocracies operating in senile, irresponsible, repressive, and downright stupid fashion does not indicate that they have to operate that way. Organizations can be rendered responsive, intelligent, efficient, and humane if only we are capable of harnessing the conflict that normally operates as a derisive and destructive force and using it constructively.

This book is written for managers, members of the Establishment. An increasing number of managers want out of this Establishment. They feel trapped. They feel that they and the people they work with are apathetic because the problem of trying to render their organization more intelligent is too big. They are familiar with the books written by the prophets of doom, which point out in very great detail what is obvious to everybody, that things are pretty messed up. The managers feel that they can do very little but be obedient, that they have no methods for influencing their organization, and they find the stress levels to which they are exposed are becoming totally unacceptable. Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock considers this attitude, man envisioned as a helpless cog in some vast organizational machine, as the most persistent myth that managers have about the future. Although a persistent myth, the attitude is very pervasive among managers and is responsible for a great deal of their depression and personal gloom. We shall examine the source of this attitude and why it is at least unproductive if not totally inaccurate.

I usually start my institute courses with a description of some very ingenious experiments that have been done with rats. The experimental situation is as follows. Rats are placed in a box with a grid floor that can be electrified any time the experimenter chooses to deliver a very painful electric shock to the rat. The rat, having all the food and water that he requires, has only one simple little job to do. That job Is to make “decisions.” To measure such decision making, the rat is provided with a lever on one end of the box. A rear projection screen, onto which geometric designs can he projected, is located above the lever. The rat is then presented with a very simple managerial decision-making situation to make “go”-“no-go” decisions. This is accomplished as follows: whenever a circle is projected on the screen above the lever, the rat is to interpret that as a “go” decision. The rat must push the lever within a few seconds after the image of the circle is first projected; otherwise he receives a very painful electric shock. If he pushes the lever within the allotted time, however, nothing happens; that is, he avoids the shock.

The second image that is projected on the scieen is that of an ellipse. The ellipse is to be taken as a “no-go” decision, in that when it is projected the animal receives an electric shock only if he pushes the lever. If he does not push the lever, nothing happens. Now, if a very clear circle and a very clear ellipse are used, the rat can live in this environment very happily and very contentedly. That is, the rat eats quite normally, drinks quite normally, and does not display any behaviors that indicate that he is under a high level of stress or anxiety. The rat almost never receives an electric shock as he is simply attentive to the display during the time when he is supposed to work (i.e., when images are displayed).

We now interfere with the rat‚s happy little world by making the circle more and more like an ellipse. The point comes when the rat can no longer, with absolute certainty, discriminate hetween the “go” signal and the “no-go” signal. Under such circumstances the rat goes through a condition known as experimental neurosis. He throws himself over on his hack, goes into a catatonic state, gives a great many indicators of having a full-blown hysterical attack, and if he is left in this situation he will eventually die.

The rats are not managers, of course, but there is a lesson to be learned from this experiment; it indicates one of the primary causes of stress, the necessity to make decisions based on imperfect information when the cost associated with error is extremely large. We have many prototypes of such stress situations: such jobs as air traffic controller, in which information overload is a serious problem, at times rendering decision making difficult, when the cost associated with error is extraordinarily large; or responsibility for operating very costly, high-speed, automated equipment, in which error, in this case perhaps simply delay in responding to a warning signal, can result in the production of large quantitites of unsaleable items or damage to costly machinery.

At the management level, managers are frequently placed in a position in which they have to render decisions based on imperfect and inadequate information when the cost associated with error is great. With the advent of highly automated information retrieval systems, such as remote access computer retrieval systems, it is frequently not the paucity of information that increases the uncertainty of a correct decision but the relatively new phenomenon of information overload. We are now in a situation in which managers can be provided with more information in 30 seconds than can be digested in 2 weeks. Managers are frequently placed in a position in which they do not have time to simply review all of the available information to determine what information they really want to examine in some detail. They are in a situation in which the costs associated with incorrect decisions are frequently high but in which the information needed to increase the accuracy of decisions is either ambiguous, confusing, or simply buried in unmanageable quantities of other information. The decision maker is caught in a situation of extraordinary stress.

People in stressful situations, like the rat imthe box, start developing serious problems associated with the parasympathetic nervous system. They ulcerate; they have coronary complications; they are grumpy and angry and cannot cope with other trivial stressful situations. And we have other indicators, such as alcoholism, high levels of interpersonal conflicts, high divorce or marital conflict levels, high turnoverism, absenteeism, grievances, etc. etc.

It is also enlightening to learn that brain overload may be related to brain deterioration. Ivan Khorol recently reported in a UNESCO publication that improper use and overloading of the brain has brought “the human brain . . . to the brink of ruin.” He points out that the twentieth century brain must process more information daily than previous generations would have processed in a lifetime. As an interesting aside, we know that senility is much more prevalent in older males than in older females. Given the male presence in most decision-making situations relative to the female presence, one wonders whether equality in the corridors of power will equalize the senility statistics?

Now, one of the reasons that managers are placed in such high levels of stress is that the organizational structure in which they are involved is hopelessly archaic. The only method that organizations seem to have for responding to inevitable change is that of the major shakeup. Consulting firms have estimated that all organizations experience a major shakeup or reorganization on the average of once every 2 years, and even that seems to be a conservative estimate. Organizations are not responsive but change the way dictatorial governments change. Once things become intolerable then a counter-power group develops that eventually is able to bring about a coup.

The second reason managers are exposed to such extraordinary levels of stress is that the information that they have is old and out of date. A recent television commercial for one of the data communications companies showed a manager sitting behind his desk taking things out of his in-basket, shaking his head, and putting them in his out-basket with the statemont “had I known about this yesterday, something could have been done.” We very frequently do not receive the up-to-date information required because the burden of providing information does not reside where it should in the organization. Very frequently it is the manager‚s obligation to find out what the people for whom he is responsible are doing and where they are with respect to specific projects that have been assigned to them. The burden for obtaining information, of eourse, should not reside on the decision maker.

The third source of stress is that the information obtained by the decision maker is not in the correct form. Often it is buried in copious trivial information that, althongh important, is not important to the decision maker at that time. Moreover, very frequently the information that is received by the decision maker has been sifted and abstracted, if not “sweetened,” by a subordinate who may not be cognizant of the nature of the information required by the decision maker.

As an aside, referring again to animal studies, it is interesting to note that one can create much the same sort of hysterical-like behavior in animals that have been exposed to choices between two positive but mutually exclusive events. Much as the donkey that was caught between two haystacks and starved to death because he could not decide at which haystack he wished to eat, hungry monkeys have been rendered neurotic by offering them a choice between two equally attractive foods. Monkeys frequently forced to choose between equally attractive amounts of, say, cherries and peanuts, in which the choice of one means the loss of the other, become maltempered and develop tics, stupors, and so forth. Again, I am not trying to indicate that managers are rats or monkeys but I am trying to point out that we have very good evidence to indicate that any kind of decision making is stressful husiness. We are not doing much to increase the life expectancy of managers at the present time and there is some evidence that the life expectancy of middle-level managers is actually declining somewhat.

The fact that many managers spend 60 or 70 hours a week, and sometimes more, doing their jobs points out another immediately obvious problem. Managers spend 70 or 80% of their time doing housework. They are busy fighting “brushfires” or “bailing out the boat” to use some of the common buzz phrases. Everything is an urgent problem and the deadline is yesterday. They spend their time checking on the details of work being done by subordinates and they chase people trying to find out what is going on or the state of a particular job. They are urged to give guidance on issues to relieve others of decision-making stress. They deal individually with people, attempting to encourage them to improve their performance. They waste untold hours in committee meetings that are called not for the purposes of decision making but because somebody is bored or lonely or does not wish to take the responsibility for making a decision. They supervise the efforts of a large number of individuals on a one-to-one basis. They supervise budgetary commitments and sometimes people come to them when they run out of pencils. The point is that most managers spend an incredible amount of time in supervisory activities, which, although a necessary part of management leadership, does not define the main function of a manager. The main function of a manager, as is obvious to every manager, is to anticipate future events and develop systems and processes for accomplishing those future events. That is, the main function of a manager is to avoid brushfires, not to put them out. This requires that managers spend a large amonnt of their time in planning and forecasting activities and an equally large amount of time developing systems to bring future eventualities to fruition.

The purpose of this book is to review some of the concepts from both polemology (the science of contention) and organizational behavior. It is directed specifically at providing managers with a workable understanding of the situations that give rise to stress as well as the workings of organizations that render the organizations stupid and unchangeable except by major confrontation. As I stated before, the book grew out of my consulting experience and the experience I had offering courses to managers at various institutes. It reflects the comments, suggestions, and concerns of many extraordinary managers; those who are highly concerned with making their old organizations more efficient and more intelligent. It reflects my own experience as a department chairman in a university as well as my experience of attempting to radically force change in hopelessly senile sycophantocracies—and losing. It is written specifically for managers, or bureaucrats if you prefer, because we need good administrators; and if important changes are going to take place in society, I am convinced that it is people on the inside who are going to generate those changes.

To accomplish these things, to reduce your own level of stress, to make your operation more efficient, to start introducing important changes in your organization, you are going to have to become a Sherlock Holmes type of manager. You have to make your management experience into a science. Good managers, like good scientists, like good physicians, like good teachers, are good observers. They collect evidence, they formulate hypotheses, they test their judgment against the available facts and they discard hypotheses, theories, and notions that prove to be inconsistent with the facts. Above all, they collect information. They avoid opinionated guesses or basing their judgments on bias, tradition, or marriage to methods of operation that have proved successful in the past.

We are going to be focusing on the structure of organizations. In particular we shall be concerned with those structural features which generate conflict, affect decision-making processes, and affect the veracity of information. We are not dealing with personalities. It is the basic premise of this book that good managers are intelligent people who understand organizations and the dynamics of group decision making. They are not born with the talent. There are no specific characteristics associated with their leadership capabilities. In other words, the only things that are required to be a first-class manager are smarts and training.

I am writing to you, that is, other managers, as part of the Establishment. I am also writing not as someone who is capable of changing total organizations, which I assume most of you are not. You are caught somewhere in the organization and feel, probably quite rightly, that no matter what you do you are going to have very little effect in terms of the total organization.

In his new book Something Happened Joseph Heller (1974) captures this feeling of impotence. The major character, Bob Slocum, a successful middle-aged corporation executive, contemplates disobedience by spindling, tearing, folding, defacing, stapling, and mutilating his neat machine-processed pay check:

What would happen if, deliberately, calmly, with malice aforethought and obvious premeditation, I disobeyed? I know what would happen: nothing. Nothing would happen. And the knowledge depresses me. Some girl downstairs I never saw before . . . would simply touch a few keys on some kind of steel key punch that would set things right again, and it would be as though I had not disobeyed at all. My act of rebellion would be absorbed like rain on an ocean and leave no trace. I would not cause a ripple.

I suppose it is just about impossible for someone like me to rebel anymore and produce any kind of lasting effect. I have lost the power to upset things that I had as a child; I can no longer change my environment or even disturb it seriously. They would simply fire and forget me as soon as I tried. They would file me away [p. 15].

The basic premise on which this book is written is that, although you do not control the organization and hence cannot change the total situation, you can introduce change within your own area of influence, be that two people or two hundred people. Therefore, rather than trying to change institutions by major confrontation, much like Samson destroying the temple, or perhaps a more appropriate analogy may be Don Quixote charging his windmills, we can attempt to change total organizations by grabbing one pillar and shaking it. If a few do so, the collective turbulence may then be sufficient to force the organization to become responsive or to crumble.

To be a good Sherlock Holmes manager, however, you must have the facts. You know there is conflict. I do not have to tell you that; what I can tell you about, however, is what conflict is, what gives rise to it, how one type of conflict differs from others, what kinds are destructive, and most importantly how it can be harnessed. You know people play games. We are going to talk about different strategies of such situations or interactions and how you can understand what is going on while it is going on, not after all is said and done. You know you make decisions with imperfect information. You know yon are gambling. What we are going to talk about are the resources you have and how you can avoid rendering yourself stupid by focusing your attention on the wrong causes or the wrong features in your organization. We are going to talk about how you can be more successful as a manager, how you can develop an organizational structure within your area of influence that permits you to live with inevitable change. For the organization of the future will not be stable: it will be constantly changing and constantly developing. We can hope these changes to be systematic and disciplined as opposed to explosive and destructive. We are going to be talking about how you harness conflict and how you make it work for you. To understand these concepts we will be talking about different philosophies of conflict, the various theories of conflict, theories of power, different kinds of games, myths, and so on. This is not a conservative book. It is based on the assumption that what we are doing today is decidedly not the best model for what we should be doing tomorrow.

I should indicate at the outset that in the last chapter I propose a simple organizational structure that can be used for small departments within organizations which I have suggested to many managers over the past few years. It has been put into effect by many managers in a number of nationally visible companies. It works and it works very well indeed. However, it is not the only organizational system and I wish to stress at this point that this is not a book on techniques, gimmicks, whistles, or bells. There are other systems that work well and perhaps better than the one advocated at the end of this book...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Parameters of Power and Conflict
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index