Task 1:Share a summary of your Analysis Assignment as well as THREE takeaways from the readings/videos/self-assessment (200 word minimum). Complete your original post by Friday at Midnigh

Self-Assessment: Dutch Test for Conflict Handling

Purpose: This self-assessment is designed to help you identify your preferred conflict-management style.

Instructions: Read each of the statements below and circle the response that you believe best reflects your position regarding

each statement. Then use the scoring key below to calculate your results for each conflict-management style.

When I have a conflict at work or school, I do the

following:

Not at

all Seldom Sometimes Often

Almost

Always 1. I give in to the wishes of the other party. 1 2 3 4 5 2. I try to realize a middle-of-the-road solution. 1 2 3 4 5 3. I push my own point of view. 1 2 3 4 5 4. I examine issues until I find a solution that really

satisfies me and the other party. 1 2 3 4 5

5. I avoid confrontation about our differences. 1 2 3 4 5 6. I concur with the other party. 1 2 3 4 5 7. I emphasize that we have to find a compromise

solution. 1 2 3 4 5

8. I search for gains. 1 2 3 4 5 9. I stand for my own and other’s goals and interests. 1 2 3 4 5 10. I avoid differences of opinion as much as possible. 1 2 3 4 5 11. I try to accommodate the other party. 1 2 3 4 5 12. I insist that we both give in a little. 1 2 3 4 5 13. I fight for a good outcome for myself. 1 2 3 4 5 14. I examine ideas from both sides to find a mutually

optimal solution. 1 2 3 4 5

15. I try to make differences seem less severe. 1 2 3 4 5 16. I adapt to the parties’ goals and interests. 1 2 3 4 5 17. I strive whenever possible toward a 50-50

compromise. 1 2 3 4 5

18. I do everything to win. 1 2 3 4 5 19. I work out a solution that serves my own and the

other’s interests as well as possible. 1 2 3 4 5

20. I try to avoid a confrontation with the other. 1 2 3 4 5

Scoring Instructions: To calculate your scores, write the number circled for each statement on the appropriate line in the scoring key

below (statement numbers are in parentheses), and add up each scale. Then read the interpretation provided on

the next page.

Interpreting Your Score:

The five conflict-handling dimensions are defined below, along with the range of scores for high, medium, and

low levels of each dimension.

Conflict-Handling Dimension and Definition Score Interpretation

Yielding: Yielding involves giving in completely to the other side's

wishes, or at least cooperating with little or no attention to your own

interests. This style involves making unilateral concessions, unconditional

promises, and offering help with no expectation of reciprocal help.

High: 14 – 20

Medium: 9 – 13

Low: 4 – 8

Compromising: Compromising involves looking for a position in which

your losses are offset by equally valued gains. It involves matching the

other party’s concessions, making conditional promises or threats, and

actively searching for a middle ground between the interests of the two

parties.

High: 17 – 20

Medium: 11 – 16

Low: 4 – 10

Forcing: Forcing tries to win the conflict at the other's expense. It

includes “hard” influence tactics, particularly assertiveness, to get one’s

own way.

High: 15 – 20

Medium: 9 – 14

Low: 4 – 8

Problem Solving: Problem solving tries to find a mutually beneficial

solution for both parties. Information sharing is an important feature of this

style because both parties need to identify common ground and potential

solutions that satisfy both (or all) of them.

High: 17 – 20

Medium: 11 – 16

Low: 4 – 10

Avoiding: Avoiding tries to smooth over or avoid conflict situations

altogether. It represents a low concern for both self and the other party. In

other words, avoiders try to suppress thinking about the conflict.

High: 13 – 20

Medium: 8 – 12

Low: 4 – 7

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Teaching power in ways that influence students’ career success: some fundamental ideas

Jeffrey Pfeffer

Organizational Dynamics (2019) xxx, xxx—xxx

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect

jo u rn al h om ep ag e: ww w.els evier .c o m/lo c ate /o rg d yn

Forty-five years ago, power as a topic was mostly absent from management textbooks and courses, including execu- tive education teaching, in the fields of business and public administration. This was the case notwithstanding the fact that power dynamics are invariably present in most public and private sector workplaces. Research demonstrates that power affects resource allocations among departments and other subunits as well as decisions on strategic direction in organizations of all types. Research also shows that power affects people’s career trajectories, including their salaries and the hierarchical levels they attain.

Former Center for Creative Leadership staffer William Gentry has said that the inability to successfully manage power relationships can cause career derailments. Extensive research by Gerald Ferris and his colleagues as well as other scholars demonstrate that political skills can be reliably measured, and that political skills and accurate perceptions of power distributions and social networks are positively related to career success, the acquisition of power, and some aspects of job performance.

In short, power matters. Furthermore, research by Ronald Burt demonstrates that when people learn social networking concepts in an executive education program, those execu- tives’ careers accelerate, a finding that demonstrates that power concepts can be taught. If power is measurable, substantively important, and teachable, the first and most obvious, but nonetheless important, implication is that material on organizational power should be much, much more widely covered in both core, elective, and executive classes taken by people aspiring to leadership positions.

Long ago, analyses of power began, and pretty much ended, with French and Raven’s descriptions of five sources or types of power (reward, coercive, legitimate, expert, and referent, to which Raven later added information). In

Please cite this article in press as: J. Pfeffer, Teaching power in ways

Organ Dyn (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2021.100830

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2021.100830 0090-2616/© 2021 Published by Elsevier Inc.

succeeding decades, research substantially expanded to consider, among other important topics, the disinhibiting effects of power on power holders, various strategies and tactics for exercising power, and a more sophisticated under- standing of numerous sources of power. Although there are now elective courses on power in more schools than there once were, and power as a topic is more widely found in both textbooks and in a burgeoning research literature, power remains much less widely taught, researched, and written and talked about than other, conceptually related subjects such as leadership. As former U.S. cabinet secretary John Gardner once wrote, power is part of leadership and inex- tricably entwined with it. Nonetheless, Rosabeth Kanter’s 40-year old comment that power is “America’s last dirty word” remains unfortunately still too much the case.

When people learn how to obtain and use power, and when individuals overcome their reluctance or inhibitions in doing so, they can substantially accelerate their career progress and help ensure they will not have to leave a job involuntarily.

In this article, I describe what I and others have learned about how to teach power to students and executives in a way that is at once true to the research literature on power, relevant to people’s careers, and leads, in many instances, to real change in behavior that helps people achieve greater career success and effective influence.

BEGIN BY ACKNOWLEDGING RESISTANCE TO THE TOPIC & ITS CAUSES

The subject matter of power makes many people uncomfor- table. It is useful to acknowledge that fact at the outset and to explore why that is the case, as a way of helping people surmount their initial resistance to the topic.

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Just world thinking

One cause of discomfort is people’s desire to believe that the world is just and fair. Social psychologist’s Melvin Lerner’s just world theory argues that people are motivated to believe that the world is just and fair, in part because a belief in a just world serves a number of psychological functions. Just world thinking provides a sense of control and the potential for possible personal efficacy. If the world operates according to just rules, people can learn those rules and be comfortable acting according to them. Because the world is just and fair, behaving according to social norms and ethical guidelines will enable people to achieve just, and more importantly, predictable outcomes.

System justification motivation

System justification theory argues that people have a pal- liative need to justify the status quo and existing social hierarchies, even when such hierarchical arrangements legitimate those same individuals’ and groups’ inferior and disadvantaged positions. In that sense, system justifica- tion theory provides an explanation as to why groups parti- cipate in their own disempowerment. One argument is that seeing the world as unjust, without corresponding power to change it, will leave people chronically unhappy, and they are motivated to come up with world views that provide contentment not distress. Moreover, justifying social reali- ties also excuses the requirement for individuals to engage in risky and effortful actions to change existing arrangements.

Individual and organizational interests

Some people find the following confusing: in most if not all classes for executives or younger students, the emphasis in the material is on how to make the organization or other entity, such as a work group, more effective and successful. Most of the material on power, and many classes on power, are focused on making the individual more successful in attaining power and other markers of career success such as salary and hierarchical position. As much research, for instance on executive compensation, shows, the two are far from perfectly correlated. It is possible to be part of a successful team or company and suffer career setbacks and even be fired, or to be part of a failing enterprise and to do quite well. Reorienting people to think about their own career poses yet another challenge that can make them uncomfortable with the material.

There are at least two justifications for this re-orientation in focus. First, many human resource departments in the U. S. (and elsewhere) have for the past several decades been telling employees that they, the employees, are responsible for their own careers. Fewer companies offer the prospect of long-term employment, many have people sign statements acknowledging that they are employed “at-will,” companies increasingly use contract and other outsourced labor, and companies increasingly eschew responsibility for things ran- ging from retirement to health care.

Second, as already noted, the correspondence between individual and organizational success is not high. Consider a classic case–what happens to founders. As USC professor

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Organ Dyn (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2021.100830

Noam Wasserman described in The Founder’s Dilemma, more than 50 percent of founders are replaced as CEO by the time the startup raises its third round of funding, with 73 percent of the founder-CEO replacements occurring when the foun- der was fired. Moreover, founder-CEOs who succeed in build- ing a fast-growing, successful company are actually more likely to be replaced. That is because fast growth frequently requires the raising of more outside capital, and those sources of capital are more likely to replace founders. It is also because, as the spouse of a founder told me, no one fights over garbage. The more successful the company the more likely it is that there will be others who will engage in a power struggle for control.

Acknowledgement of the psychological desire to believe that the world is just, systems are fair, and one important goal of management education is to make organizations more effective, coupled with numerous everyday observa- tions of the many forms and manifestations of injustice, unfairness, and the ways in which individual interests are sacrificed by organizations, permits people to acknowledge many aspects of social reality. People can at least intellec- tually come to appreciate the need to understand and possibly deal with the world as it is, as a first step to changing social and organizational life.

The leadership literature

Yet another cause of some people’s discomfort with power is a vast and ever expanding leadership literature and the many classes that teach leadership and related topics that convey more about how we might want leaders to be and behave– —aspirations for leadership–—than the realities of what we know about how leadership operates in the real world. Although most science, and even much social science is, or tries to be, objective, in the study of leadership often there is not even any pretense of a completely unbiased search for the truth. Numerous scholars of social influence explicitly set out to demonstrate that “good” behavior is more effective than “abusive” actions. For instance, social psychologist Dacher Keltner calls his research center the Greater Good Institute. One professor who studies power opened a research talk on power and status with the explicit acknowledgement that they were trying to demonstrate that nasty, hostile behavior was counterproductive.

These are just two of numerous examples that illustrate precisely why so much of the leadership literature is and should be suspect. We know from many scientific fields ranging from medical and physical science to the social sciences that people will find what they are looking for, if for no other reason than they will run studies or do analyses until they eventually confirm their beliefs. No wonder so much of leadership teaching comports neither to observed reality nor to relevant social science findings.

As I noted in Leadership BS, there are numerous contra- dictions between what is commonly taught in leadership classes and books and what we know from extensive social science research. For instance, although leader modesty is valued and praised in much leadership teaching, an exten- sive, even vast, research literature demonstrates that nar- cissism and unwarranted self-confidence predict being hired, obtaining promotions, and other indicators of career

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Teaching power in ways that influence students’ career success 3

success and leadership emergence, including, in some instance, aspects of job performance.

For the most part, the leadership literature values authen- ticity. Herminia Ibarra, in both written work and a lecture available on YouTube, and Adam Grant in his New York Times essay, “Unless You’re Oprah, ‘Be Yourself’ Is Terrible Advice,” both make similar points about the problems with the “be authentic” advice. Being true to your authentic self excuses people from having to develop and grow. As Grant related, before he became a skilled presenter, being true to himself would have meant not speaking in public very much if at all. Second, leaders often need to be true not to how they are or are feeling, but to what the people around them need from them–—confidence, energy, focus–—regardless of how they may want to behave in the moment.

As yet another example, although almost no leadership class would teach people to engage in strategic misrepre- sentation, a large literature on lying suggests that lying is reasonably common in everyday life and seldom sanctioned. Important, revered historical figures such as Abraham Lin- coln lied, for instance, about where the Southern peace delegation was. Steve Jobs was famous for his “reality distortion field,” the idea that if Jobs said something often enough and with enough conviction and skill, what was not true at the moment might become true–—the self-fulfilling prophecy in action.

Thus, material on the realities of power confronts the dilemma that principles of power, to the extent they are evidence-based, are at least to some extent in conflict with what people have learned in other contexts and from other sources as well as different from what they may want to believe. As the CTO of the Wall Street Journal told me to explain why he had a hard copy, audiobook, and e-book version of Power, the material in that book was asking him to do things that did not come naturally, because of how he was raised and his prior education.

The stages of learning about power

Because of the discomfort arising from the desire to believe in a just world and the differences between an evidence- based understanding of power and what people have learned in other classes and in other settings, people will go through stages as they learn about and become more comfortable with power. On the first day of my elective course on power, I describe these stages.

First, confronted with material that makes them uncom- fortable, individuals often experience denial, something that afflicts at least some of my social science colleagues as well. Denial manifests as trying to find instances where power principles don’t hold and the leadership literature seems to be true. For instance, people will argue that principles of power don’t apply in particular settings such as small, entrepreneurial organizations or in high technol- ogy, other cultures such as in Europe or Asia, for millennials of a different generation and values, and so forth. I confront those claims with both evidence and logic that suggests that power and its manifestations are largely unchanged and unchanging across time and across contexts.

Denial is typically followed by anger, as people do not always appreciate having their fundamental beliefs

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challenged. My view is that education is, or certainly should be, mostly a process of causing people to question what they thought they knew. If education were just about reinforcing what people already thought, it would add only trivial value as people would leave the class not much different than when they arrived.

Sadness sometimes follows anger, as people come to under- stand the findings of a social science literature that does not always paint the most uplifting or inspiring picture of organi- zations or people andtheir power-relevant social interactions. For instance, in The Power Broker, Robert Caro describes how Robert Moses, over a forty-year career, built parks, play- grounds, and swimming pools all over New York City, Lincoln Center, bridges, roads, and public housing, and became influ- ential in urban design. But Moses also made deals with poli- ticians, on occasion giving them advance notice of where he would be building and construction contracts to obtain their support. Caro’s extensive historical material on Lyndon John- son, detailed in his four-volume (with a fifth on the way) Path to Power series, can cause people, who admired Johnson for his passage of important civil rights and social welfare legisla- tion including Head Start and Medicare, to become more circumspect in their evaluations of his behavior. Johnson may have stolen his first election to the Senate from Texas. He gave dictation while sitting on the toilet, and was often abusive to subordinates. He opposed the first attempt to pass federal anti-lynching legislation. The reality is that many people inboth publicand corporate lifehaveusedunattractive means to acquire the power and resources that then permitted them to do great things. Observers are sad to see the reality of their heroes’ behavior.

If the class is successful, a sense of acceptance follows the feeling of sadness. With acceptance, people master important power principles and come to understand that if they are to successfully navigate, let alone change, orga- nizational life, it is useful, indeed, necessary, for them to comprehend how the world works and why it works that way, and the basic theoretical underpinnings that explain and predict behavior. It is also useful for them to put their learning into practice, a topic to which I return later in this article. Most fundamentally, they need to come to terms with organizational and social life as they are if individuals are to effectively navigate and cope with the world.

Self-reflective exercises that ask students to think about how the topics have played out in their own lives and what they might have done differently based on what they have learned, and how they intend to use the material in the future, help anchor conceptual learning with lived experi- ence. As former M.I.T. faculty member Donald Schon noted, self-reflection promotes learning. U.C. Davis management professor Andrew Hargadon once commented that many people who think they have 20 years of experience don’t. They just have one year of experience repeated 20 times. Directed self-reflection seeks to ensure that people system- atically reflect on and learn from their actions.

SOURCES OF POWER

When people learn about the sources of power, they can work to acquire these determinants of power for themselves. Fundamentally, power comes from a) a set of individual

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qualities or attributes that individuals can improve through practice and coaching, and b) a set of structural conditions that people can seek to develop. In teaching people about the possible sources of power, we implicitly convey the message that someone’s power resources and position can be improved, thereby encouraging them to take action to do so.

Personal attributes and their development

Because effort is required to achieve power, one quality associated with power acquisition is ambition–—the desire to acquire power. Ambition is not fixed. People are much more likely to seek power–—or for that matter, try to accomplish anything–—to the extent they feel personally efficacious and believe that success from their actions is at least plausible. Few individuals want to waste efforts on lost causes. One important consequence from learning material on power and seeing examples of similar others who have achieved power is providing people with a sense of personal agency and a set of role models that suggest that achieving power is possible for them, too.

Related, but distinct from ambition and drive, is the quality of self-confidence. Research consistently demonstrates that even unwarranted self-confidence predicts interview success, getting hired, obtaining promotions, and rising to powerful positions. University of Virginia professor Peter Belmi’s research focuses on the social psychological processes through which social class reproduces advantageous outcomes. He has found that higher social class people exhibit more self-con- fidence, and because self-confidence affects obtaining power- ful positions, higher social origin individuals have advantages in the competition for power because of their inherently greater levels of confidence.

No path to power is going to be free from obstacles, opposition, including competitors, or setbacks. Therefore, persistence and resilience are useful if not essential qualities for achieving positions of influence. Persistence is related ambition–—to the extent that someone wants to achieve a position of influence, that individual will be more willing to persist in efforts to achieve that objective. For instance, Willie Brown, whose mother was a cleaning lady and who grew up in a town in Texas where discrimination against African-Americans was pervasive, became the two-time mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California Assem- bly for some 14 years. Brown lost the first time he ran for the assembly and he also lost his first race for speaker. He did not let these setbacks derail his political ambitions. Reed Hast- ings, the enormously successful CEO of Netflix, was unsuc- cessful in his first CEO role and has said he would have fired himself. Resilience is developed by seeing others overcome setbacks and by learning to not take negative events per- sonally.

Emotions, including energy, are contagious. People who are energetic inspire others around them. Former Caesar’s CEO Gary Loveman has noted that one of the roles of senior leadership is to exhibit energy, because others need that energy–—intellectual energy and sheer kinetic energy. Energy is partly a result of physical conditioning and training and also a consequence of mental state. Ambition and resilience both help to develop energy.

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Because management is fundamentally about getting things done through others, the capability to ascertain where others are coming from, the source of their desires and actions–—empathic understanding–—is a crucial power skill. Most commentators on the late U.S. president Lyndon Johnson note that he was not only a great reader of others, he spent much of his time assiduously observing and talking with others to ascertain their hopes, fears, and desires. While practice in listening to and apprising others helps, training people to look at how others are rewarded and the sources of their information about the world can also be useful.

Possibly the most important individual quality producing power is that of not obsessively worrying about what others think of you, a quality that also permits individuals to be able and willing to engage in conflict. As Gary Loveman of Caesar’s has famously quipped, “if you want to be liked, get a dog.” Leaders are charged with getting things done and making sometimes difficult strategic decisions, for instance, to down- size and restructure to preserve the economic viability of the enterprise. The people laid off almost certainly won’t like the individual responsible for these decisions. Innovation, in pro- ducts or processes, is often disruptive, and few people enjoy having their routines disrupted. Consequently, leaders of fundamental change often provoke criticism and resistance. Moreover, rising to power invariably means winning competi- tions for promotions, and those who lose out are not necessa- rily going to be happy with the outcome. For all of these reasons, the capacity to act without needing to be popular is a crucial quality that we see in many powerful leaders in domains ranging from politics to business.

How to develop these qualities? Have people rate them- selves, and possibly have current or former work-relevant peers rate them, on their possession of personal attributes that are useful for acquiring influence. Once people see where they could use improvement, individuals can develop and execute, possibly with the help of an executive coach, specific activities designed to build more strength in quali- ties that are useful for acquiring power.

Structural sources of power

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