Dysfunction and Power

In May 1985, Apple's CEO, John Sculley, proposed a plan to the board of directors to remove Steve Jobs from his beloved Macintosh group and to put himself in charge of New Product Development. Sculley and Jobs had not been seeing eye-to-eye about resource distributions within Apple. Jobs had wanted to invest more resources into the new Macintosh, while Sculley wanted to focus on the older but more successful Apple II. After Jobs heard of Sculley's power move, he was furious and immediately strategized a counterattack to get rid of Sculley and re-take Apple. This epic power struggle between these two high-power figures (which tormented Apple for many years and led to Jobs' temporary resignation) is now frequently told as a cautionary tale in Silicon Valley for how relationships between founders and their CEO replacements can go awry.

When power emerges as a bone of contention in teams, such as in the case between Sculley and Jobs, team outcomes can be severely impaired. Understanding when and why power can become contested in teams, or groups of three to ten people whom work together interdependently towards a common task goal, has therefore become an important area of research within organizational behavior. To illustrate, numerous team-level studies on power have shown that power and politics go hand-in-hand in teams with a single power holder or multiple power holders. In teams with lower power dispersion and/or power-levels, power struggles and conflicts appear to be substantially less. Power struggles, in turn, have routinely been demonstrated to harm the ability of teams to function and perform.

The research which has documented the negative effects of power in teams is important in helping organizations learn how to optimize team effectiveness and to prevent team performance failures. However, the ability of research to be successfully applied to organizations depends ultimately on the strength of the underlying paradigm. Therefore, concerns arise from the growing disconnect between this line of research on the negative picture of power in teams and the positive picture of power that has been documented in individual-level research on power. Namely, power has been shown to offer individual actors a host of benefits, including an increased desire and ability to pursue goals, enhanced executive functioning, and even improved life satisfaction. Work in this line has also shown that these benefits are relatively stable - low power individuals were found to lack the ability or motivation to change their position, and to often (paradoxically) support the systems and hierarchy which suppress them. This line of work was also extended to initial predictions on how power should shape teams, with initial key theories on power in groups and teams proposing power to be a stable and beneficial quality for teams. However, the emerging empirical findings on power in teams suggest that power may shape teams differently than it does individuals. While power may make individuals feel empowered and lead them to pursue their goals, power within teams may actually make people more focused on their dependencies and vulnerabilities towards one another and may resultantly often be contested and unstable.

We seek here to understand how the emergent work on the dark side of power in teams can be reconciled with the long-standing literature on the benefits of power to individuals as well as with initial theories on the functionality of power for teams. We begin with the general premise that context matters - contexts can widely vary in organizational research, and contexts can fundamentally shape how information, such as power, is understood and interpreted. Therefore, identifying when theories apply across contexts or are specific to certain settings is critical. When applying this lens to the study of power, we suggest that in the context of organizational teams, where members all know each other and regularly interact towards the achievement of a common goal, power may exert effects that have not been captured in past research on the individual benefits of power. Past studies on the benefits of power for individuals were largely conducted in isolation of actual social interaction, focused on individual rather than team outcomes, and/or examined power in contexts where power was largely immutable. Theories which emerge from such contexts may not necessarily hold true in more complex, dynamic organizational settings.

Indeed, in organizational teams, in contrast to individuals working in laboratory environments often in the absence of social interaction, social comparisons around power are more likely and power positions themselves are more mutable. In teams, people with and without power directly interact with one another in the team task context, perceive each other's power, and choose whether to accept or challenge each other's power. Indeed, in such team task contexts, DeRue and Ashford suggest that members frequently make claims upon one another to legitimize and/or promote one's own power and influence, and the others in the team have the choice to grant these claims or not. A growing line of research suggests that a large number of such claims are actually denied, and that power in teams is frequently challenged and renegotiated. This suggests that research on power in the context of teams may have yielded a more negative picture than that given by research on power at the individual-level because power in the context of task tasks is more readily perceived, contested, and changed.

We review here this growing body of work on power in team contexts, compare it to what is known about the effects of power on the individual level, and then theoretically refine and integrate the paradigms and assumptions in both of these areas to develop an understanding of how both areas can, together, explain why and when power negatively impacts team outcomes. By understanding the processes by which power negatively affects teams, and when such negative processes are likely to be turned on or turned off, we open the door for future research to build on our knowledge to start to better unpack why and when power may have the potential to benefit teams.

We therefore make three contributions with this paper. First, with our review of the literature on power in teams, we qualify, challenge, and extend existing theories and assumptions on the topic of power. Our review suggests that positive perspectives on power in the team setting were too directly derived from the individual-level research, which may not apply in the same way in teams, and need to be redrawn to be better tailored to the specific team context. Additionally, our review suggests that at this point in the literature, negative conflict accounts appear to be more robust when examining power in teams. Second, we provide a needed comparison of the literature on what power does to teams to the literature on the effects of power on individuals. We use this comparison to highlight the directionally oppositional effects of power that have emerged across these different levels of analysis, offering insight into how the nature and dynamics of power may change across contexts. Third, we integrate findings at both the team and individual-levels of analysis to develop an emergent conflict account of how the benefits of power for individuals may paradoxically translate into negative outcomes at the team-level. This allows us to provide a lens to understand how disparate findings fit together and to offer a broad range theory to help guide future research in this area. Specifically, we theorize that because power offers numerous benefits for the power-holder, this can lead power to be a salient basis for social comparisons in teams where one or more members hold power. This implies that the effects of power-possession at the individual level can create a sensitivity, or awareness of and reactivity to power within the team setting. When such power-sensitized teams face external resource threats (such as uncertainty in the external environment or inter-team competition) or personal resource threats within the team (such as perceived illegitimacy or factionalization into subgroups), we propose that teams will descend into performance-detracting power struggles. When such threats are absent, the dark side of power will remain contained, and future research can seek to understand how, why, and when power can be harnessed to benefit team outcomes.