Organizational Dynamics: Power and Influence

Organizational Dynamics: Power and Influence Paper
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Power contributes to the attainment of effective leadership by shaping a leader's capacity to influence, make sound decisions, and inspire organizational success. It helps a leader to achieve goals, inspire people, and enhance social change. Just like parents and teachers require the power to engage children effectively, organizational leaders need the power to create productive healthcare teams. In healthcare leadership, power helps leaders implement strategies, set goals, and effectively allocate resources to improve patient outcomes. However, power should be disciplined and kept in check to harbor potential adverse consequences. According to Bacon (2011), unchecked power could suggest abuse of authority, undermine client trust in the institution, disorient teamwork, and jeopardize organizational harmony. Maintaining a balanced power distribution is critical in healthcare, where decisions directly impact patient care outcomes. Discipline and power checks must ensure accountability, transparency, and receptiveness to input from leaders and healthcare professionals. This fosters collaborative decision-making, centered approaches, and ethical conduct, ultimately enhancing effective and quality leadership. This paper discusses sources of organizational and personal power, self-assessment results, as well as their importance in the career path of a healthcare professional.
Sources of Organizational Power
The existence of role power depends on the fact that people work in social organizations, and for them to operate, people should play their assigned roles. Role power stems from a leader's formal organization's position. It grants authority to individuals based on hierarchical structures, job titles, and responsibilities. Role power operates with a strategic domain giving leaders the ability to enforce policies, make decisions, and allocate tasks (Bacon, 2011). Resource or economic power is garnered from the ability to control resources needed or wanted by other individuals. It is a privilege enjoyed by leaders because of their formal positions. It allows them to control, allocate, and manage resources to enhance strategic initiatives and shape organizational outcomes (Moon, 2019). In this vein, resource power and information power are closely correlated. Information power is the capacity to access critical and valuable knowledge promptly. Such information is critical to leaders in making informed decisions and earning respect and credibility (Buchanan & Badham, 2020). It demands a leader to easily retrieve information, interpret, organize, and disseminate it to offer insight to others within an organization. Network power is the aptitude for building and nurturing an effective network of relationships in and out of an organization through leadership influence. Leaders gain this power from social capital as they strive to create relationships with individuals (Bacon, 2011). This power is transitory and also dissipates once a leader leaves their position. Reputation power is earned through components like consistency in behavior, successful outcomes, ethical conduct, and other factors that most ef...