The Social Scientific Study of Leadership: Quo Vadis?

A field study was conducted to discover how a manager's use of nine different influence tactics is related to target task commitment and the manager's effectiveness. The variables were measured with a questionnaire filled out by subordinates, peers, and the boss of each manager. The most effective tactics were rational persuasion, inspirational appeal, and consultation; the least effective were pressure, coalition, and legitimating. Ingratiation and exchange were moderately effective for influencing subordinates and peers but were not effective for influencing superiors. Inspirational appeal, ingratiation, and pressure were used most in a downward direction; personal appeal, exchange, and legitimating were used most in a lateral direction, coalitions were used most in lateral and upward directions; and rational persuasion was used most in an upward direction

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Consequences of Influence Tactics Used With Subordinates, Peers, and the Boss

Several bodies of literature contributed to a framework describing how three activities—identifying, packaging, and selling—can lead to successful environmental championing. The results of a field ...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1556355.pdf

Individual Environmental Initiative: Championing Natural Environmental Issues in U.S. Business Organizations

The authors explored the relationship between managerial influence tactics and employee resistance to organizational change. Using attribution theory, the authors developed a series of hypotheses concerning the effects of influence tactics on employee resistance to change and the ways in which these relationships are moderated by leader-member exchange. Results, which are based on multisource data, suggest that employee resistance reflects both the type of influence a manager uses and the strength of leader-member exchange.

Employee resistance to organizational change: Managerial influence tactics and leader-member exchange.

The study reported here examined the relationship between workplace ostracism and employee psychological distress (i.e. job tension, emotional exhaustion, and depressed mood at work) by focusing on the joint moderating effects of ingratiation and political skill. Data from a two-wave survey of 215 employees in two oil and gas firms in China indicated that as predicted, workplace ostracism was positively related to psychological distress. Moreover, the findings showed that when employee political skill was high, ingratiation neutralized the relationship between workplace ostracism and psychological distress, but when it was low, ingratiation exacerbated the relationship.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2011.01017.x

Coping with Workplace Ostracism: The Roles of Ingratiation and Political Skill in Employee Psychological Distress

This study involved analysis of incidents describing influence attempts from the perspective of an agent or a target. Influence behavior in the incidents was coded into nine influence tactics. A conceptual framework was presented to explain the selection and sequencing of tactics, and the model was used to derive specific hypotheses for individual tactics. Analysis of tactic combinations revealed that some tactics were used together much more often than others. Consistent with the model, some tactics were used more in initial influence attempts, and other tactics were used more in follow-up influence attempts. Differences in the use of tactics with subordinates, peers, and superiors were also consistent with the model, and the results verified directional differences found in earlier research with questionnaires.

Joo Young Youn

Papers

Patterns of Influence Behavior for Managers