Influence at Work: A 25-Year Program of Research

Abstract

Organization of any kind, from prehistoric hunting societies to companies working through the worldwide web, operate with a distribution of influence and power among their members. This distribution of influence has consequences at three levels: for the people working in the organization, for the organization itself, and, from time to time, for members of society outside the organization. A series of action-and policy-oriented projects on the distribution of influence were developed by or in collaboration with the Centre for Decision Making Studies of The Tavistock Institute over a quarter of a century. They started with a seven-country comparative research on top management decision making, followed by two 12-country studies on Industrial Democracy and a 5-year longitudinal program in seven companies in three countries. These and two longitudinal projects in Britian, one on a motor car manufacturer and the other on an airport, used a similar conceptual framework. The article draws on the evidence from this program of work, describes the evolving theoretical model and concludes that organizational influence sharing appears to have made only limited progress during the last 50 years. Four explanations are put forward: overidealistic expectations; a tendency to ignore the need for certain necessary antecedents, like competence; a tendency to act as if influence sharing is not subject to contingencies like the nature of tasks; and probably most importantly, the almost universal tendency to design influence sharing measures through uncoordinated mechanistic social engineering.