Power and Influence in Organizations
Course Features
Building Authority and Empowering Others
This course provides participants with foundational knowledge and skills to better acquire power, exercise influence, and empower others in organizations. Designed around research-based principles of social interaction and psychological principles of influence, this course leverages questionnaires, role-play exercises, mini-cases, and group activities to help participants develop a deeper awareness of their own baseline inclinations to accumulate power and influence others. Individuals that deeply understand why they want to gain power are usually more effective at doing so. While this course deliberately remains agnostic about these reasons, participants will grow to understand the benefits of exercising “power with others” versus “power over others”.
Power and influence are vast topics that can propel many lifetimes of scholarly pursuit. This course is meant to be an introduction to the topic in order to make visible the often-hidden dimensions of power and the related suite of social interactions that stem from it. The first part of the course focuses on detecting and understanding why and how power and influence are used in organizational life. The second half of the course builds upon these topics, noting how to empower people that you manage and how to avoid the link between power and corruption.
Power and Influence in Organizations can be taken as a standalone course or as a prerequisite for the Executive Certificate in Organizational Leadership.
Program Details
Who should attend
- Leaders who want to strengthen their ability to exercise influence, empower others effectively, and enhance their perceived credibility
- Managers, team leads, and project leaders aiming to enhance collaboration and “power with others” rather than “power over others”
- Professionals preparing for greater leadership responsibility who want to develop greater self-awareness around their motivations and influence style
Learning Objectives
- Articulate varying perspectives on power and influence.
- Explore direct and indirect skills and influence techniques that can be used to enhance your effectiveness in navigating power and influence in organizations.
- Examine sources of power and explore how to effectively empower those that you manage.
- Increase self-awareness and knowledge of power issues to achieve effective self-development and change.
Faculty
Cassandra Chambers, PhD
Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Cassandra has a PhD, Business Administration (Management & Organizations) from the University of Michigan, an MBA from University of Florida, and a BA, Political Science from University of California Los Angeles. Her research explores how organizations use algorithmically maintained reward systems to motivate extra-role behaviors. Using a mix of archival and laboratory studies that rely on big data as well as targeted interventions, her primary body of work aims to advance research on this new world of algorithmic motivation by exploring the unintended consequences that may arise from algorithmically maintained reward systems.