79. Informal Authority in the Workplace

Formal authority—the power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior—is the defining characteristic of societal and organizational hierarchy.¹ Ideally, after Heifetz (1994), it is expected to serve five functions that most will agree are indispensable to social life. They are to (i) provide direction, (ii) offer protection, (iii) orientate roles, (iv) control conflict, and (v) maintain norms. Then again, in practice, there is a darker side to what formal authority can do on any given day: for instance, a boss can restrict a subordinate’s actions, invalidate his or her decisions, or move for dismissal.

Charting a chain of command up a hierarchy, one will eventually locate someone (or some group) who administers the organization’s collective decision rights (and enjoys the perquisites ascribed to the function). With power comes a set of resources with which to manage the holding environment of the organization and marshal attention. Yet, if formal authority resides at the top in most types of organizations to this day, it is located there as part of an exchange against overt expectations in a specific context.² Therefore, it can be taken away. Commonly, it is also lent on to lower level managers according to the relevance and importance of their positions (with which special rights and privileges are in turn associated). Paradoxically, in all cases, managers can be made responsible for getting things done but are not given the requisite authority—certainly not over their own bosses or peers.

Formal authority cuts less and less ice: in networked, pluralistic organizations that have no choice but to rapidly devise adaptive, not just technical,³ solutions in a composite world, the power of formal authority is eroding as its utility becomes less clear. (As a result, many managers often feel they have traded their erstwhile, relative freedom against a chimera.) At the same time, since many organizations are discarding command-and-control hierarchies in favor of flatter management structures, and essential expertise and decision-making ability is ever more widely dispersed in organizations,⁴ it is necessary to excel at persuasion to move people in the right direction and get work done through others under new conditions. Therefore, all things considered, formal authority is best understood as the potential for power, the total amount of which twenty-first century organizations should aim to expand by leveraging mutual influence among personnel.

Leadership is a process of social influence by which a person enlists the aid and support of others in accomplishing a common task. Having a positive leadership effect does not depend on formal authority; indeed, some of the best leadership comes from people who purposely eschew that. Conversely, many persons in positions of authority do not exercise leadership: to (endeavor to) fulfill the five basic social functions enumerated above, they navigate warily between Charybdis and Scylla, keen to avoid the troubles that arise when one asks people to confront problems; they are quite happy to simply preserve equilibrium. Extreme responses are to become overly directive or too collaborative.

Clearly then, there is a difference between what returns can be expected from formal authority on one side and from leadership on the other. Hence, clarion calls for more informal authority in organizations. Unlike the former, which relies on conformity without acceptance (Kelman 1958), the power of informal authority to influence attitudes and behaviors rests on admiration, credibility, respect, and trust, which conduce conformity coupled with acceptance. Notions of distributed leadership and management by persuasion appeal: by their means, organizations can become sophisticated and versatile, listening to and utilizing the expertise of many to intensify mutual influence and make vision real and central.

The record of mankind’s attempts to define (then refine) the principles of successful social influence is long.⁵ In the sphere of interpersonal relationships, influence is having a vision of the optimum outcome for events or circumstances and then motivating people to work together to make the vision authentic.

Herbert Kelman has identified three broad varieties of social influence—namely, compliance, identification, and internalization—that represent three qualitatively different ways of accepting influence. Paraphrasing, compliance takes place when an individual accepts influence because he or she hopes to achieve a favorable reaction from another person or group. That is, the individual adopts the induced attitude or behavior because he or she expects to gain specific rewards or approval and avoid specific punishments or disapproval by conforming. Identification occurs when an individual accepts influence because he or she wants to establish or maintain a satisfying self-defining relationship with another person or group. He or she adopts the induced behavior or attitude because it is associated with the desired relationship. Internalization happens when an individual accepts influence because the contents of the induced behavior or attitude—the ideas and actions that compose it—are intrinsically rewarding. He or she adopts it because of congruence with his or her value system. From a social psychology perspective, the determinants of conformity are normative⁶ and informational.⁷

In truth, irrespective of whether authority is formal or informal, the force that drives attitudes and behaviors, and therefore influence, is the near-universal belief that people should (in one form or another) be paid back for what they do, be that good or bad. Individuals and groups will respond to one another in similar ways: they will react to kindnesses and gifts with benevolence; conversely, they will respond to hurtful acts with some form of retaliation (or at least indifference). Their methods can be crude and mechanical, such as a literal execution of the principle of “an eye for an eye” (“tit for tat”); or they can be complex and sophisticated, e.g., one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and generalized reciprocity. (Parallels exist in the animal world.)

Connection promotes collaborative intent and multiplies the chances of collaboration. Usefully, Cohen and Bradford (2005) have framed an influence model based on reciprocity⁸; it brings the metaphor of currencies into play to describe the process of influence as exchange. They contend that effective managers attempt to build collaborative arrangements with potential allies, even when the latter seem at first adversaries, by discerning what currencies they might have to offer. (Sources of currencies are, broadly, organizationally, job-, and personally determined.) In other words, a manager will exercise influence only insofar as he or she can offer something that others value. (The model needs not be restricted to management; it applies to other walks of life too.)

At least five types of currencies are at work in various organizational settings: (i) inspiration-related, (ii) task-related, (iii) position-related, (iv) relationship-related, and (v) person-related.⁹ Many require no permission to spend, e.g., expressing gratitude, showing appreciation, paying respect, making the attainments of others visible, enhancing someone else’s reputation, and extending one’s personal help on tasks.¹⁰ Unsurprisingly, the use of each is context-specific and hinges on the availability of capital. However, almost everyone has a portfolio of currencies, even though some are more highly valued than others, trade-offs are often possible—granting that some people may have such fundamental differences in what they hold dear that joint understanding is on occasion difficult to reach¹¹: The key is to identify one’s resources relative to a potential ally’s wants without underestimating what one has to offer. The Cohen–Bradford model of influence rests on a long-established feature of human nature as it relates to organizational context. (The recent breakthroughs of social neuroscience are fostering other comprehensive theories of the mechanisms that underlie human behavior.) At both individual and organizational levels, also in the case of formal authority, and enriched or not by Robert Cialdini’s five other principles of persuasion, the model illuminates the necessary practice of persuading in the workplace. It does well to expose the fallacies of gratuitous guidelines for mastering the art of persuasion and the pseudoscientific injunctions of persuasion campaigns.¹²