Discussion

Discussion 1: Pen Attack and Cyber Terrorism 

There are a variety of ways that a cyber-attack can cause economic damage. In many cases, attackers try to “penetrate” systems in order to steal technology or other sensitive information. When do you think an attack can be classified as cyber terrorism?

Please make your initial post and two response posts substantive. A substantive post will do at least TWO of the following:

• Ask an interesting, thoughtful question pertaining to the topic
• Answer a question (in detail) posted by another student or the instructor
• Provide extensive additional information on the topic
• Explain, define, or analyze the topic in detail
• Share an applicable personal experience
• Provide an outside source

(for example, an article from the UC Library) that applies to the topic, along with additional information about the topic or the source (please cite properly in APA 7)

• Make an argument

concerning the topic.

At least one scholarly source should be used in the initial discussion thread. Be sure to use information from your readings and other sources from the UC Library. Use proper citations and references in your post.

Discussion 2: Impacts on Work productivity —

After completing the reading this week, we reflect on a few key concepts this week:

1. Discuss what power in the context of leadership is and how it relates to bullying within organizations.  Also, note how this impacts productivity.
2. Discuss what organizational culture is and how it impacts work productivity.  Also, note how organizational culture impacts the success of innovation implementation.
3. How does culture impact leadership? Can culture be seen as a constraint on leadership?

Please be sure to answer all the questions above in the initial post.

Please ensure the initial post and two response posts are substantive.  Substantive posts will do at least TWO of the following:

Ask an interesting, thoughtful question pertaining to the topic
• Expand on the topic, by adding additional thoughtful information
• Answer a question posted by another student in detail

Share an applicable personal experience
Provide an outside source
Make an argument

At least one scholarly (peer-reviewed) resource should be used in the initial discussion thread.  Please ensure to use information from your readings and other sources from the UC Library.  Use APA references and in-text citations.

Organizational Leadership

John Bratton

1

Part 1
Contextualising leadership

Power and leadership
Chapter 3

3

Learning outcomes
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
Recognise and explain the types of power within leadership processes
Understand and explain the different perspectives on power
Describe the evolution of studies of power and leadership as a field of learning
Understand and explain the concept of organisational politics, its relationship to power and leadership
Identify contemporary challenges around power and leadership
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Introduction
What is power? Power is generally defined as the capacity or the potential to influence others in relation to their beliefs, attitudes or activities.
Critical leadership scholars contend that orthodox leadership theories (trait, behavioural, contingency, charismatic) adhere to traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic control systems and take the asymmetrical power relationship within the leader-follower dyadic as natural and unproblematic (Collinson, 2011; Gordon, 2011; Hardy and Clegg, 1996).
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Introduction
The literature on non-traditional follower-centric and team theories of leadership espouses the sharing of power between leaders and followers.
Critical organization scholars, however, contend that non-traditional approaches ‘blur’ power relations and generally continue to adopt an apolitical perspective to power.
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Conceptualizing power
Karl Marx
The making of history is made not just in relation to the physical world but also through the struggles that some social groups engage against others in circumstances of domination.
He argued that “class interests” – capitalist versus workers – follow from the social relations concerning the ownership and control of the means of production, and there conflict and power is structured into organization design.
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Conceptualizing power
Max Weber
The probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.
Theory of legitimate domination through legally enacted policies and regulations, found in modern bureaucracies, with two central elements:
the legitimacy of the organizational leader’s power, and the perception by followers that the leader’s authority was legitimate for those who were subject to it.
the creation of an “administrative apparatus” in which followers carry out the commands of the leader.
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Conceptualizing power
Max Weber
The treatment of ‘power’ as ‘authority’ to mean institutionalized ‘authority’ (from the mistranslated ‘Herrschaft’) became the basis for orthodox studies of power, in which power relates to authority, as a phenomenon informally rather than formally developed in the organization.
The ‘formal-informal’ distinction thus becomes the focus where “authority is the potentiality to influence based on a position, whereas power is the actual ability to influence based on a number of factors including, organizational position” in the hierarchy.
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Conceptualizing power
Orthodox studies of ‘power’ in work organizations have located the bases of power in some relationship with, such that they enable ‘power’ to be ‘exercised’ or in specific socially authorized ‘resources’ that a worker may control.
E.g. , ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’ (Dahl, 1957, pp. 202–3). Power ‘over’, whether individually or collectively, refers to the control of one agent over others, and power ‘to’ is the capacity to realize ends.
Tendency to focus on ‘power over’ by critical scholars due to the concentration of its oppressiveness and injustice. However, Hearn (2012) argues that ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ are “inextricably bound together … it is the increase in power over, in ever more extensive and complex forms of hierarchic social organization, which has yielded massive increases in our power to”.
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Conceptualizing power
French and Raven
Focuses on the potential ability of one individual to influence another within a certain social situation.
This theory assumes that the particular ‘resource’ possessed by the individual that will have a utility in one situation, will have that usefulness in all situations.
It also assumes perfect knowledge on the part of all concerned being able to judge correctly the utility of the all resources in all situations (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980).
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Conceptualizing power
Five bases of power – referent, expert, legitimate, reward and coercive
Giddens (1985) notes that all individuals may “have power”, but in an organizational context, power is influenced and constrained by the distribution of different types of resource.
E.g. “allocative resources” – control over physical things such as monetary reward, and “authoritative resources” – involve control over management practices.
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Conceptualizing power
Stephen Luke
Power is a “three-dimensional” phenomenon.
The one-dimensional view of power focuses on the individual’s ability to enact commands in observable conflicts.
A two-dimensional view of power extends the analyses by examining the ability of the social actors to control the agenda, which is a source of power overlooked in the pluralist model, one-dimensional perspective.
The three-dimensional view is the social processes in which those with power induce the powerless to behave or believe as the former wish, without coercion. This is achieved by a complex infrastructure of persuasion or justification.
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Different perspectives on power
Foucault
Power operates at all social institutions, at all levels of social interaction and through all individuals.
Power does not intrude from powerful individuals; it exudes from within.
Followers are not the victims of others’ power; rather, they are both the perpetrators and the victims of the very power that constrains their behaviour.
Power is associated with the web of policies, practices and procedures found within organizations.
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Different perspectives on power
Conceptualizing power as a relational activity, rather than as a possession, widens the focus of attention from the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ to ‘how’ of power, HR policies and practices, for instance, by which it operates.
Power also prevents some behaviours while at the same time positively encouraging others, both at the broadest political and historical levels and at the deepest level of individual identity.
Power constitutes what we know as a society, including, of course, how we think about work organizations – emphasizing that power and knowledge are closely interconnected, serving to reinforce each other.
Power is all-pervasive.
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Different perspectives on power
Gramsci
‘Hegemony’ that acknowledges the complexity and mixture of consensus and conflict, and hence power relations in a broad sense. This term expresses two types of power relations:
A group’s domination over other groups.
A group’s leadership.
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Different perspectives on power
It expresses the relationships of leadership and domination that produce a general sense of coordinated reality for most people. Besides that, it also represents an active, social process in which alternatives resistance against incorporation.
No leader can guarantee that followers will follow and any discussion of power and leadership has to acknowledge that leader-follower relations are inevitably characterized by structured power, cooperation and conflict.
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Different perspectives on power
Weber’s & Lukes’s concepts of power Foucault’s and Gramsci’s concepts of power
Power is possessed by the individual Power is relational & pervasive
Power resides in social elites Power is found in everyday social practice
Powerful dominates powerless, resistance is futile People build their own web of power, resistance challenges elites
Power is negative and repressive Power is creative & contributes to social order

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Different perspectives on power

Table 3.1 Traditional and Non-traditional Conceptualizations of Power
Source: Source: Adapted from Buchanan, D.A. and Badham, R.A. (2008) Power, Politics and Organizational Change: Winning the Turf Game, London: Sage.
Weber’s & Lukes’s concepts of power Foucault’s and Gramsci’s concepts of power
Power is visible, exercised when needed Power is imperceptible through everyday routines
Knowledge of power sources is empowering Knowledge buttresses the web of power

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Power and management
Obedience is central to an analysis of the construction of power in leader-follower relations (Clegg, 1998).
In organization situations, French and Raven’s coercive power commonly implies the ability of a leader to inflict on subordinates feared penalties for disobedient behaviour or control over subordinates. Crucially, it is the subordinate’s dependency for coercion to be effective. However, uses of power imbalance to coerce may involve bullying behaviours that undermine a subordinate’s dignity and self-esteem (Bolton, 2005).
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Power and management
Bassman (1992, p. 2) observes, “one common thread in all abusive relationships is the element of dependency. The abuser controls some important resources in the [target’s] life; the [target] is dependent on the abuser”. There are also research evidences that suggest that leader-coercive behaviour and bullying behaviours occur in workplaces because of the inability of the victim to defend her or himself due to a power imbalance (Branch et al., 2013). It is the analysis of dependency, the processes of social interaction, the minutiae of everyday work experience and the often misogynistic norms that informs its conduct that provide a more cognizant understanding of leader-coercive and bully behaviours in organizations.
21

Power and management
This also serves as a reminder that not all of leader-follower social interactions rest upon charismatic appeal or the ritual of deference or adulation. They also remind us that leaders perpetrate coercive-bully acts and too often this is interpreted as representing a “few bad apples”, as though socio-cultural influences are of no importance. But they are embedded within organizational cultures and processes, which in turn form part of wider societal processes (Bolton, 2005). Bolton also highlighted that the vagueness of the employment contract gets intensified within the cauldron of coercion and abuse.
22

Power and management
The effect of leader-coercive behaviour and bullying on recipients:
can range from psychological stress-related symptoms to physical harm (Hogh et al., 2011).
can also affect employees’ loyalty, commitment, and performance (Rayner, 1997).
affect organizational performance through an increase in absenteeism, high turnover and the cost of recruitment and training interventions, as well as loss of productivity (Salin and Hoel, 2011).
E.g. Tesco executives Chris Bush and John Scouler
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Power and management
Gordon (2002; 2011) found that power in leadership is generally debated in two perspectives:
Traditionally, power is seen as a phenomenon within hierarchical structures and control systems of organization.
Second focus is on the role of dispersed leadership theories and their emphasis on the promotion of empowerment through the transfer of leadership responsibilities to lower levels with post-bureaucratic organizations (Bryman, 1996).
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Power and management
Orthodox Theories
Presents leaders with dualistic position of privilege within organisations – considered to be superior to other followers either through natural ability or particular attributes.
The historical nature of power is deemed to be ‘natural’ and ‘unproblematic’ – leading to limitations to reflections of surface-level issues and occurrences. Gordon (2011, p. 200) added on that the theme describes of what is occurring or what ‘ought’ to occur and lacks of abundant insight into the problematic interplay between leadership and power.
Power is assumed to be legitimate for leadership figures but illegitimate for organizational followers or for trade unions challenging managerial prerogative.
25

Power and management
Dispersed Leadership Theories
Focus primarily on self-leadership and team-based leadership approaches:
Self-leadership – employees take responsibility for their own work processes and direction.
Team-leadership – centres around autonomous work teams, each of which has their own leader.
26

Power and management
The sharing of leadership responsibilities ensures that the emphasis is put on the process of leadership rather than the attributes or behaviours of the ‘leader’.
However, this also assumes that power must also be shared and that the process of sharing power will be unproblematic.
Power is something that is embedded historically and socially in the structures around organisational actors; it is closely related to the concept of dependency and therefore pervades activity and impacts on attempts to disperse leadership.
27

Power and management
Flemming and Spicer (2014) illustrated that there is a clear distinction in the literature between episodic theories of power (where power is directly exercised) and systematic forms of influence (where power is concealed within often enduring institutional structures), through identification of four sites of organizational power:
Power ‘in’ organisations
Power ‘through’ organisations
Power ‘over’ organisations
Power ‘against’ organisations
They also recognized that there are roles of other types of authority within organizational leadership, how they interlink and overlap or contrast within.
28

Power and management
Weberian social theory,
the bureaucratic organization is viewed as a ‘social tool’ and an expression of rational thought and action. Any follower in a large organization will encounter a complex flow of power down, up and across organization hierarchies (Clegg, 1998). Power is part of the ‘rules of the game’ that both enable and constrain social action in the workplace (Clegg, 1975).
McKinlay and Starkey (1998),
found that Foucault’s conception of power is that it is most potent and efficient when it operates through bureaucratic rules rather than coercion or ‘force majeure’. Power is associated with practices and procedures – control of human capability rather than coordination of resources.
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Power and management
Townley (1994),
discovered that following Foucault, for individuals to be manageable, they must be known and to be known, they must be rendered visible – thus conceptualizes human resources management (HRM) is designed to close the gap between the expectation of performance and what is realized.
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Organizational Leadership

John Bratton

Part 1
Contextualising leadership

Culture and leadership
Chapter 4

3

Learning outcomes
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
Explain the nature of culture and its relationship to organizational culture.
Critically evaluate how organizational leaders seek to change or manage the culture of an organization.
Appreciate critical perspectives on culture and alternative cultural perspectives towards market relationships.

Introduction
Culture is:
Used to describe the internal behaviour and processes in a workplace.
Referred to external socio-economic and political forces that form part of the external context of organizations.
Cultural theorists believe that cultural is central to “all aspects of organizational life” (Alvesson, 2016, p. 26).

The nature of national cultures
Williams (1988) identifies three usages of the word ‘culture’ which are based on social values, norms and assumptions which people may not always be aware of:
As a process of intellectual, spiritual or aesthetic development.
As a reference to a particular way of life.
As reference to the arts.
Giddens and Sutton (2017, p. 995),
defined culture as “the values, norms, habits and ways of life characteristic of a coherent social group”.
The idea of a national identity can be socially constructed, malleable and is being constantly reproduced.

The nature of national cultures
The term “socialization” is used to describe how members of a society learn and embed various layers of culture, both by internalizing the norms, mores and values of society, and also by learning to perform social roles.
Schein (2017) describes culture as a concept directing us to notice the patterns in social engagement and behaviour.
Although the multinational company (MNC) has been theorized as the very embodiment of “disembedded society”, that is, it has severed any dependencies on social institutions in its domestic base (Lane, 2000), business leaders are nonetheless exposed to, and influenced by national cultures.

The nature of national cultures
The nine cultural dimensions found by House et al., (2014):
Uncertainty avoidance or the extent to which the society relies on rules to avoid uncertainty.
Power distance or views about the extent power should be unequally distributed.
Institutional collectivism, which refers to the identification of broader societal interests compared with individual goals.
In-group collectivism- expression of pride in social organizations and families.
Gender egalitarianism, which refers to the promotion of restriction of gender equalities.

The nature of national cultures
Assertiveness, the encouragement of toughness as opposed to submissiveness.
Future orientation, the forward planning and support for change compared with support for traditionalism.
Performance orientation, the extent to which people are encouraged and rewarded for improved performance.
Human orientation, the degree of cultural support for fairness and concern for others.

The nature of national cultures
For example, the Anglo group (US and UK) is found as competitive, results-orientated and less attached to their families in general. They also seemed to favour charismatic/value-based leadership. However, attempting to find cultural values as a general perception overlooks the divisions in societies, which mediate the responses of individuals according to their values linked to class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and region.
Modern pluralistic societies have always been fractured and fractious and values always openly contested (Malik, 2017).

The nature of national cultures
Dominant, subcultures and countercultures
The idea of a dominant culture implies that in a society with diverse cultures and class divisions a ruling class is able to persuade most of the population that its values and worldview should prevail.
It is widely held in many sociological perspectives that a shared belief system or a ruling class ideology has a crucial role in maintaining social order in class societies.
A culture can never be completely dominant as there is always the possibility that competing values will exist or that the experience of some sections of society such as the poor will, through their life experience, fail to be entirely convinced of the legitimacy of the ruling ideology.

The nature of national cultures
Within society, or, indeed, within a work organization, there may be groups who do not share the dominant values but express themselves through different values and symbols such as dress codes or language. For groups who are stigmatized within society their subculture may provide ways of coping and support for their self- respect and identity.
Where a subculture opposes or inverts the values of the dominant culture it may be regarded as counterculture. A counterculture may provide a symbolic resistance to a dominant culture or even a solution for its members as they can find a more positive self-definition within that culture.

Understanding organizational culture
The national cultures embedded within people need to be understood because they interweave explicitly and predictably with peoples’ thinking and action inside the workplace, and for leaders, they provide choices of who to be in various situations (Schein, 2017).
Although national culture is basic to social interaction: “Organizations are typically best seen as existing in a broader cultural context, with a variety of societal, industrial, regional, class, occupation, etc., cultures interplaying” (Alvesson, 2011, p.153).
The current trend in mainstream management literature about ‘corporate culture’ is that a leader’s influence and power causes others to act.

Understanding organizational culture
Central to this vision of corporate culture is the idea that with, “the right corporate vision, mission statement or leader, an organization can build a highly committed, unified culture that fosters productivity and profitability” (Martin 2002, cited in Alvesson, 2016, p.267).
However, while cultural control can help to reduce ambiguity and reinforce organizational processes it can also encourage ‘group think’ and hinder critical thinking and can lead to unproductive activities and mistakes (Alvesson, 2016).

Understanding organizational culture
The term ‘organizational culture’ found in the literature describes a system of ‘shared’ values and beliefs, co-produced by leaders and followers, which seek to reinforce employee behaviour so as to achieve the organization’s goals. However, organizational culture is permeated by the broader social culture as it is made of a multiplicity of cultural orientations.
e.g. Visible artifacts, stories and legends, rituals and ceremonies
The iceberg metaphor illustrating the three levels of organizational culture

Understanding organizational culture
In contrast to organizational culture, which reflects the invisible and intangible dimension of organizational life, organizational climate relates to managers’ and other employees’ evaluation of tangible workplace attributes (Norton et al., 2015).
Schneider and Reichers (1983) define organizational climate as employees’ perceptions of formal policies, the procedures that translate policies into guidelines, and the practices that act upon them. Climate is conceptualized as an artefact of organizational culture (Schein, 1990) as shown in Figure 4.2.

Understanding organizational culture
Organizational culture and organizational climate are:
two complementary constructs, but reveal overlapping nuances in the social and psychological life of complex organizations.
The former tends to take a sociological approach, using qualitative methodology, to examine symbolic and cultural forms of organizations.

Understanding organizational culture

Perspectives on organizational culture
Leadership scholars adopt different perspectives from cultural theorists on the study of organizational culture:
Durkheim’s concern for social solidarity through ideological consensus suggests that culture is the social ‘glue’ binding an organization together whereas Weber emphasizes that individuals behave ‘not out of obedience, but … because … of unreflective habituation to a regularity of life that has engraved itself as a custom’ (Weber, 1922/1968, p. 312, emphasis added).

Contemporary literature identifies four perspectives:
Managerialist
An organization-wide set of values devised by senior managers in order to produce a committed and loyal workforce, through managing employees.
Focus on the role of leaders, their style of leadership and the kinds of culture most appropriate to the achievement of the goals of the organization.
Symbolic-Interactionist
Shared meanings produced by workers and management in regular, routine contact – it is not fixed but subject to negotiation over time.
Perspectives on organizational culture

Contemporary literature identifies four perspectives:
Social Conflict
Rooted in Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism.
Assumes that conflict is a basic feature of all organizations as members struggle for control over scarce resources.
Perspectives on organizational culture

Values, norms and beliefs are assumed to develop to maintain the power and control of management.
Joanne Martin (1992) found that organizational culture is characterized by so much ephemerality, ambiguity and change, and so exposes the truth claims of monolithic and united corporate cultures – exposing the naivety of thinking that there is no ambiguity in what cultural members believe and do.
Perspectives on organizational culture

Feminist
Gender is a central aspect of organizational analysis.
Gender, defined here as the “patterned, socially produced, distinctions between female and male, feminine and masculine (Ackers, 1992: 250), is crucial for understanding how people encounter support, encouragement and skepticism in organizational contexts (Alvesson and Billing, 2009, p. 1).
Gender analysis is important because some organizations (e.g. schools, media) directly play a part in the socializing processes in which people acquire gender identities (Helm Mills and Mills, 2000).
Perspectives on organizational culture

Organizational culture, climate and leadership
In terms of cultural change strategies, Alvesson (2011, p.152) explores three perspectives on organizational culture and leadership:
The role of leaders in creating an organizational culture.
Leadership as maintenance and reproduction of organizational culture.
Culture as framing and reframing by leadership.

Organizational culture, climate and leadership
While HR practices may ostensibly be able to create a particular culture during the organization’s formative years, over time “other complexities and other influences than founder values often undermine the impact of the latter” (Martin et al, 1985, cited in Alvesson, 2011, p.157).
There are also other influential factors such as:
Culture as a constraint on leadership
Ideology as part of culture
The role of employee engagement and voice