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Influence at Work: A 25-Year Program of Research

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Human Relations

Abstract

Organization of any kind, from prehistorichunting societies to companies working through theworldwide web, operate with a distribution of influenceand power among their members. This distribution of influence has consequences at three levels: forthe people working in the organization, for theorganization itself, and, from time to time, for membersof society outside the organization. A series of action- and policy-oriented projects on thedistribution of influence were developed by or incollaboration with the Centre for Decision MakingStudies of The Tavistock Institute over a quarter of acentury. They started with a seven-country comparativeresearch on top management decision making, followed bytwo 12-country studies on Industrial Democracy and a5-year longitudinal program in seven companies in three countries. These and two longitudinalprojects in Britian, one on a motor car manufacturer andthe other on an airport, used a similar conceptualframework. The article draws on the evidence from this program of work, describes the evolvingtheoretical model and concludes that organizationalinfluence sharing appears to have made only limitedprogress during the last 50 years. Four explanations are put forward: overidealistic expectations;a tendency to ignore the need for certain necessaryantecedents, like competence; a tendency to act as ifinfluence sharing is not subject to contingencies like the nature of tasks; and probably mostimportantly, the almost universal tendency to designinfluence sharing measures through uncoordinatedmechanistic social engineering.

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Heller, F. Influence at Work: A 25-Year Program of Research. Human Relations 51, 1425–1456 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016958602523

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