1967 Organization and Environment.

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

March, James G and Herbert A. Simon

1958 Organizations. novel York: Wiley.

McClelland, David

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

The central question that this research addresses is in subordination to what conditions do work units attempt to influence the design or operations of other work units? Influence attempts are united 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, of the like kind as designing or adjusting unit behavior to external directives or constraints, to extremely proactive, in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as attempting to modify external directives or constraints to fit existing unit behavior. Interunit influence attempts fall, by way of definition, on the proactive extremity of this range. While previous research has for the most numerous part focused on reactive behavior, our knowledge of organization will be incomplete without more understanding of the conditions subject to which unit members behave proactively to influence the design of the other units.

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

Our make anxious with the proactive and potentially political aspects of unit organizing is based onward a view of organizational arrangements that Gouldner (1970: 215-216) referr to as "functional autonomy." In this view, plans are defined as groups of autonomous vital airs whose connectedness is problematic. Traditionally, theorists have treated adaptation to the environment as a single point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled solved by the organization as a whole. In contrast, we view adaptation as an ongoing proces of mutual adjustment between semiautonomous parts; the adaptation of each part not past nor futures 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 point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled for the focal unit. Specifically, we explore influence attempts from units that are horizontally linked in peer-related settles We do not address behavior that is sporadic, erratic, and evok barely by specific issues or decisions, which about scholars contend makes up a considerable portion of political behavior (eg 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 component parts of a strategy for adaptation to the unit's functional and political environment.

Research has not care a straw fored interunit influence attempts as a design strategy, and interunit politics in general is not well understood. Politics has been hypothesized to be the inevitable be the effect of functional differentiation (March and Simon, 1958) decentralization (Pfeffer 1981) centralization (Eisenhardt and Bourgeois, 1988) organic composition in subunits (House, 1989), or a plethora of emergencys attitudes, and dispositions at the individual flat as these find expression or frustration in organizational arrangements (McClelland, 1961; Mintzberg, 1983; House, 1989; Ferris, Russ, and Fandt, 1990) No empirical work has experimented these explanations against each other; no undivided knows, for example, the relative importance to political engagement of the organizational words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of a unit versus its internal structure

In contrast with unclose systems explanations that focus chastely on the environment or clos classification approaches that consider only internal composition this paper develops a cross-level pattern Influence behavior is a relational phenomenon; consequently we argue that it is a function of the couple organizational factors that affect interunit interaction generally and other lateral relationships that constitute its immediate words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following This cross-level approach provides greater specificity to a number of explanations extant in the theoretical literature (eg Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978; Pfeffer 1981) that belong to political behavior in general.

Background

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