What Is the Role of Power in Organizational Behavior?

The need for power refers to a subconscious drive that wants to influence others. The need for power is a higher level of need. Harvard's well-known professor McClelland has researched high-level needs and put forward the famous theory of human motivation. In this theory, he attributed human motivation to three needs, the need for achievement, the need for belonging and the need for power. ^[1]

The need for power is a particularly important psychological need. The need for power is a need to control others, take responsibility, and influence others without being affected by others. In other words, the need for power is to allow others to accept a certain point of view, become the leader of a stubborn group, be seen as a leader by others, be elected or appointed as the chairman of the committee, make decisions for the group, and resolve disputes between people. Or argue, persuade or influence others to do what you want him to do, supervise and direct his voice, work, etc. In short, the need for power is the need for one to want others to act in accordance with one of his intentions or expectations. ^[3]

The power of the manager plays an important role in the process of achieving the goal of the organization, and the power resource in the organization is a scarce resource. What kind of employees are assigned this scarce resource in the organization. The "post-80s" have gradually become the main force of the organization's human resources. A generation who has grown up in the context of globalization and informatization has a stronger personality and a deeper self-awareness. As the awakening level of self-awareness continues to increase, they begin to show publicity, clear personal goals, and power motives gradually evolve from implicit to explicit ^[8]

For the human resources practitioners of the organization, when selecting managers for the organization, the individual's power needs to be taken as an important reference basis, and the organization's power should be given to employees with higher personal power needs so that they can obtain Satisfied power needs to provide them with more motivation in management positions, while also enabling their subordinates to perform better. Of course, the need for power cannot be over-inflated. Chen Xunjiao and Xu Guoping showed that leaders need to be too powerful and have a large negative impact. One is to worsen the leadership relationship, the other is to hinder communication, the third is to discourage the enthusiasm of the subordinates, and the fourth is to generate bureaucracy and dictatorship. They also gave four ways to regulate the demand for power, which were adjusted from the four aspects of managerial self, organization, law, and society ^[10] . As far as the organization is concerned, what needs to be done is to continuously improve the organization settings and organizational policy design within the organization. Establish and improve the power supervision and supervision mechanism to restrict power needs at the institutional level. In addition, organizations should strengthen the construction of organizational culture and use value orientation to guide and restrict power needs. On this basis, increased power needs can bring greater benefits to the organization. Establish a more effective and sound internal control system.