ethical aspects of social psychology.pdf

Influence in

Organizations

Roderick M. Kramer

Margaret A. Neale

Editors

SAGE Publications

International Educational and Professional Publisher

Thousand Oaks London New Delhi

Power and

To Maureen, Matthew, and Catherine

from Rod,

and

Al, CJ and Maddie

from Maggie

Some Ethical Aspects of the Social

Psychology of Social Influence

DAVID M. MESSICK

RAFAL K. OHME

standing of social influence. One of the fundamental facts of

social life is that people influence each other, for better or worse.

Education is about influence. Communication is about influence. Or-

ganization, child rearing, coercion, and advertising are all about influ-

ence. As social psychologists study variables that affect behavior, they

are studying variables that influence or have a causal connection to

behavior, and in this uninteresting sense one can claim that all of social

psychology is about influence.

The more interesting sense is the explicit emphasis on social influ-

ence. Social impact theory (Latané, 1981), theories of persuasion and

attitude change (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993), social power (French &

Raven, 1959), social conformity (Crutchfield, 1955), and the explicit

analysis of the strategies that people use to influence each other

(Cialdini, 1993) all focus on the processes that are involved when

people change the beliefs or behavior of others or both.

M uch of social psychology, historically, has focused on the under-

POWER AND INFLUENCE IN ORGANIZATIONS

Intentional influence represents the subfield of social psychology

that we focus on in this chapter. The prototypical situation that we have

in mind contains a minimum of two elements: an agent of influence,

the influencer and a target of influence, the influenced. As Latané

(1981) noted in his social impact theory, the agent or the target or both

can be either single or multiple persons. What further characterizes this

prototypical situation is that the agent wishes, prefers, or desires some

outcome that the target can bring about. The influence episode(s)

consists of the efforts made by the agent to achieve a desired outcome

by having the target perform some action or actions. Examples of

intentional influence that fit this prototype include parents urging their

children to brush their teeth, professors requiring students to rewrite

a paper to improve its clarity, drugs being administered to calm an

aroused student, or supervisors telling their employees to falsify qual-

ity testing reports.

Intentional influence can be exerted by acts of omission. Foresee-

able and predictable things happen that are intentionally permitted to

occur, and we do not exclude such events from consideration. An

intentional decision not to urge children to brush their teeth is a type

of influence as is the decision to conceal the dangers of a product,

process, or policy. One difference between influence attempts that

consist of acts of omission and acts of commission is the potential

difference in one's ability to infer the intention of the agent. The infer-

ence of intention is crucial in judgments of the ethicality of many

influence attempts, and acts of omission often obscure the intent of the

agent. There are usually more reasons for nonaction than for action,

making the identification of the reasons for nonaction less clear.

Social psychologists have drawn many useful distinctions in their

study of social influence. Kelman's (1958) famous distinction of the

three responses to social influence provides insights into the psycho-

logical consequences of influence processes. He differentiates among

what he calls compliance, identification, and internalization. These

responses vary, in a sense, in terms of the "depth" of the psychological

changes that are presumed to occur. Compliance occurs when an indi-

vidual submits to an influence attempt in the hopes of achieving a

favorable reaction or of avoiding an unfavorable reaction. Compliance

is shallow and does not imply belief change. For example, an employee

goes to church because it makes a good impression on the boss and not

because of religious conviction. Identification occurs when an individ-

Ethical Aspects of Social Psychology

ual adopts behavior associated with a role or imitates role models.

When a new employee of a firm expresses contempt for a competing

firm for which he or she nearly went to work, he or she may be

reflecting the organizational "culture," adopting the local beliefs, atti-

tudes, and habits that characterize employees of the firm. The process

of identification may not be intentionally manipulative or even con-

scious, and it represents a deeper commitment to the behavior patterns

than mere compliance. Finally, according to Kelman (1958), internali-

zation occurs when an individual accepts influence because the in-

duced behavior is congruent with his or her value system. The

behavior seems like the right thing to do. One could falsify a report

because one was ordered to and feared the repercussions of refusing

(compliance), because one thought that such falsifications were the

way things were done in the organization (identification), or because

one believed that falsification in the circumstances was the appropriate

action to take (internalization). Kelman posits that these three re-

sponses are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Other research on social influence is based on French and Raven's

(1959) well-known analysis of the bases of social power. This classic

book identifies five psychological bases of social power. Reward power

derives from the influencer's ability to mediate rewards for the target;

coercive power stems from the influencer's ability to mediate punish-

ments. Reward and coercive power often reside in the same person,

but it is useful to distinguish them. With reward power, for instance,

it is in the target's interest to demonstrate compliance so that surveil-

lance processes are unnecessary. With coercive power, targets may try

to conceal noncompliance, requiring the establishment of mechanisms

to validate compliance. Legitimate power derives from a role relation-

ship in which the influencer has a legitimate right to prescribe behav-

ior, such as when a supervisor instructs a subordinate to perform a

duty, and expert power (also called informational power) comes from

an information asymmetry in which the influencer has some special

knowledge, expertise, or ability that the target needs. Finally, referent

power results when the target of an influence attempt identifies

strongly with the influencer.

The social psychological foundation that we find the most useful,

however, was proposed by Deutsch and Gerard (1958). These authors

proposed that interpersonal influence has two conceptually inde-

pendent components that they called normative and informational

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