Power, Conflict and Negotiation at Work: The Uses, Limits and Hidden Costs of Organizational Citizenship

Max Weber defined power as the probability that one actor in a social relationship can carry out their own will despite resistance. Organizational behavior narrows this into a more usable question: when an employee or manager gets their way inside a firm, what made that possible? John French and Bertram Raven's 1959 chapter in Dorwin Cartwright's edited volume Studies in Social Power gave the field its still-dominant answer, naming five distinct bases from which one person's influence over another can be drawn. Reward power rests on the ability to grant something the other values. Coercive power rests on the ability to impose a cost or withdraw something valued. Legitimate power rests on an accepted right to direct the other's behavior, usually tied to formal position. Referent power comes from the target's identification with or liking for the power holder. Expert power rests on perceived knowledge or skill in the relevant matter. Raven added a sixth base in 1965, informational power: the ability to shape a decision by controlling the information available to the person making it, which works even when the source is not personally admired or credentialed, simply because the information itself is persuasive or unavailable elsewhere.

Three of the six bases are attached to a position and travel with it: a newly appointed supervisor acquires reward, coercive and legitimate power the day the appointment is confirmed, whether or not anyone respects it. The other three are attached to the person and have to be earned, and they do not disappear when that person moves to a role with less formal authority. Lesson 24 examined how informal influence operates day to day inside groups, and the everyday tactics of organizational politics; this lesson supplies the theory of where that influence comes from in the first place. An engineer with no supervisory title can out-influence her manager inside a specific decision because her expert power in that domain exceeds his legitimate power over it, which is exactly the kind of situation organizational politics exists to manage.

A common error is to treat power as something a person has in the abstract, measured by job title or salary grade. French and Raven's own framework resists this: each base describes a relationship between two parties, and its strength depends on how much the target values what the power holder controls, and on how many alternative sources of it exist. The same idea organizes the strategic contingencies theory of intraorganizational power, developed from fieldwork on British and American firms by David Hickson, Bob Hinings, C. A. Lee, Rodney Schneck and Johannes Pennings (1971). Their claim was that a department gains power not from its formal rank but from how far other units depend on it to cope with uncertainty. A purchasing department managing the firm's only reliable relationship with a volatile supplier market gains influence an organization chart would never show, because other departments cannot substitute away from it and because the uncertainty it absorbs is central to the firm's results. Centrality, low substitutability and the capacity to absorb uncertainty, in their account, are what convert a position into usable power, not the position's rank itself.

The same logic applies to the two managers in the opening example. The finance manager's legitimate power over the budget is real, but its strength depends on whether the department head has an alternative route to equivalent funds, for instance a sponsor in a related department. A power base that looks strong on paper can be weak in practice if the other party has somewhere else to go, and a base that looks weak on paper, informational power held by a junior analyst who alone understands a vendor contract, can decide an outcome regardless of rank.

Louis Pondy's 1967 article in Administrative Science Quarterly, still a standard reference, treated organizational conflict not as a single event but as an episode moving through five stages. Latent conflict is present when the conditions for disagreement exist, scarce resources, competing goals, interdependence, but nobody has yet reacted to them. Perceived conflict is reached once at least one party recognizes the incompatibility. Felt conflict is a separate stage: tension, anxiety or hostility that can arrive well after perception, since a party can recognize a conflict intellectually without yet feeling threatened by it. Manifest conflict is the disagreement made visible in behavior, from open argument to deliberate obstruction. Conflict aftermath is the residue left once an episode ends, which becomes part of the latent conditions for the next one.

The stage distinctions matter practically, because an intervention that works at one stage can fail, or make matters worse, at another. Removing the scarce resource behind a latent conflict resolves it before anyone feels it. Telling two managers already in felt conflict to communicate more addresses perception but does nothing about resentment already present, and treating a dispute as though its predecessor's aftermath did not happen is a common, avoidable mistake. None of this implies that conflict is inherently damaging. Organizational behavior has long distinguished disagreement that improves a decision, by surfacing information a single viewpoint would have missed, from disagreement that damages relationships and performance without adding anything to the outcome. The practical task is rarely to eliminate conflict; it is to judge, stage by stage, which kind is in front of a manager.

Robert Blake and Jane Mouton's 1964 managerial grid, built to describe leadership style along two axes, concern for production and concern for people, supplied the template most later conflict-style instruments still use. Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann adapted the same two-dimensional logic to conflict specifically: assertiveness, how far a person pursues their own concerns, and cooperativeness, how far they attend to the other party's concerns. Crossing the two produces five modes: competing (high assertiveness, low cooperativeness), accommodating (low, high), avoiding (low, low), collaborating (high, high), and compromising (moderate on both). Ralph Kilmann and Kenneth Thomas published a forced-choice survey to measure which modes a respondent reports using (Kilmann and Thomas, 1977); under the name Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, it became the most widely administered conflict-style questionnaire in management training.

None of the five is globally best, which is the point most training workshops compress away. Avoiding a trivial disagreement over meeting rooms conserves time and goodwill; avoiding a genuine disagreement about a safety procedure can be negligent. Competing is defensible when a decision must be made fast and the cost of being wrong is high; used by a manager who will depend tomorrow on the loser's goodwill, it is expensive. The style that fits depends on the stakes, the time available, and the relationship's future, not on which mode a person is assumed to prefer.

The five-mode conceptual model and the instrument built to measure it are not the same thing, and the distinction matters. The Thomas-Kilmann survey is ipsative: its 30 items are forced-choice pairs, each mode pitted against each other mode three times, so a high score on one mode mechanically lowers the apparent score on the others. This is a structural property of forced-choice measurement, not a flaw unique to this instrument, but it means ordinary reliability statistics such as Cronbach's alpha do not straightforwardly apply, a point Deanna Womack (1988) raised directly in calling for statistics suited to forced-choice responses and for further factor analysis of the scale. Mary Konovsky, Frank Jaster and Mark McDonald (1989) pursued that factor analysis using an adapted version of the instrument with Likert-scale rather than forced-choice items. Items meant to measure avoiding and accommodating did not separate cleanly into two distinct factors, suggesting that respondents may not reliably distinguish the two styles from each other, both functioning as something closer to a single preference for sidestepping unpleasantness than two independent modes. G. Richard Shell (2001), reviewing the instrument's use in negotiation training, defended its continued pedagogical value while acknowledging the same measurement debate.

None of this shows that the dual-concern conceptual model is wrong. It shows that sorting employees into one of five fixed boxes from a single questionnaire outruns what the specific instrument's psychometric record supports, particularly for the avoiding-accommodating distinction. A manager using the TKI in a workshop is on firmer ground treating the result as a reported tendency worth discussing than as a settled trait.

Richard Walton and Robert McKersie's 1965 study of labor negotiations distinguished two logics inside any bargaining encounter. In distributive bargaining, the parties divide a fixed resource and one side's gain is the other's loss. In integrative bargaining, the parties search for a solution that enlarges what there is to divide, so both can gain at once. Most real workplace negotiations contain both logics in different proportions, which is part of why no single negotiating posture suits every dispute.

Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton's Getting to Yes (1981; 2nd ed. 1991) built a widely taught method for the integrative side of that mix, which they called principled negotiation, around four moves. Separate the people from the problem: treat the relationship and the substantive issue as distinct, so personal friction does not contaminate the terms under discussion. Focus on interests, not positions: a stated position, "I need the whole training budget," usually masks an underlying interest, such as keeping a specific certification deadline, that a different allocation might also satisfy. Invent options for mutual gain before choosing among them, rather than anchoring early on one proposal. Insist on objective criteria, an external standard such as market rate or precedent, rather than letting the outcome turn on which side holds out longer. The authors also popularized the idea of a BATNA, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement: knowing what you will do if this negotiation fails sets a floor below which accepting a deal makes no sense, and it is also, as Section 2 implied, a measure of how much power a party actually has.

James White's (1984) review of Getting to Yes, published in the Journal of Legal Education, raised the criticism most often repeated since. White argued that the book implicitly treats negotiation as if a skilled party can convert almost any dispute into an integrative one, and that this understates genuinely distributive situations, dividing a fixed bonus pool, for example, where finding an objective criterion does not remove the disagreement over how much each side gets; someone still receives less. A second limitation concerns who is actually at the table. Fisher, Ury and Patton largely treat each side as a single, unified actor, but Walton and McKersie's own framework had already identified intraorganizational bargaining as a distinct subprocess, because a negotiator on either side typically has to sell whatever is agreed to a constituency back home, a union membership, a board, a sales team, and that internal negotiation can be harder than the one across the table. A negotiator who concedes the substantively correct amount can still fail if they cannot bring their own side with them. A third limitation is practical rather than theoretical: objective criteria are not always available, and when both parties propose different, self-serving standards as "objective," the search for one can itself become a new front in the dispute rather than a way past it.

These are not reasons to discard principled negotiation. They are reasons to use it with a clear sense of which kind of dispute is in front of you, how many constituencies each side actually represents, and what happens if no objective criterion can be agreed.

Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn (1978) had already argued that an organization relying only on behavior its formal roles explicitly specify is fragile against the unanticipated events, absences, coordination gaps, process breakdowns, that formal roles never fully cover. C. A. Smith, Dennis Organ and Janet Near (1983) gave this idea a measurable form, studying 422 employees and their supervisors across 58 departments of two banks and defining organizational citizenship behavior as behavior with at least two dimensions: altruism, helping specific co-workers with a work problem, and generalized compliance, a more impersonal conscientiousness such as attendance and rule-following even without supervision. Dennis Organ's 1988 book extended the construct to five dimensions, altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, sportsmanship and civic virtue, and gave it the deliberately chosen label "the good soldier syndrome," signalling behavior that keeps an organization functioning smoothly without being individually indispensable or formally rewarded.

The mechanism Organ proposed was social exchange: employees who feel fairly treated reciprocate with discretionary cooperation even though no formal reward structure requires it, a claim that connects directly to the equity theory discussed in Lesson 23 and returned to in Section 11. Dennis Organ and Katherine Ryan's (1995) meta-analysis of 55 studies found that job attitudes, satisfaction, perceived fairness, organizational commitment, predicted OCB about as well as, or better than, most personality measures; among dispositional traits, conscientiousness was the one exception with a fairly consistent association. The practical implication is that OCB is not simply a fixed trait some employees have and others lack. It responds to how fairly people believe they are being treated, which means it can also be withdrawn.

Mark Bolino, William Turnley and Brian Niehoff's (2004) article "The Other Side of the Story," published in Human Resource Management Review, questioned several assumptions that had quietly accumulated around OCB research. One is that citizenship behavior is costless to the person performing it, which ignores the time, energy and possible conflict with family or personal life it consumes. Another is that it is always fully voluntary, when peer pressure or a supervisor's visible expectation can make declining carry a real cost. A third is that it is straightforwardly good for both the employee and the organization, when it can instead mask poor job design, let a manager substitute unpaid effort for a hiring decision that should have been made, or serve impression management rather than genuine cooperation.

Eran Vigoda-Gadot (2006) named the sharpest version of this concern compulsory citizenship behavior: a form of "voluntary" behavior extracted through implicit coercion, the unstated threat of a worse evaluation, exclusion from future opportunities, or a damaged relationship with a supervisor. The behavior still looks identical from the outside, staying late, covering a colleague's shift, attending an unpaid training session, but it functions differently. The construct's entire appeal rests on its being discretionary and unrewarded; once an organization begins expecting it, factoring it informally into promotion decisions or quietly raising the baseline over time, an employee's effective compensation for the same formal pay is lower than it appears, and refusing carries a cost that the original definition of extra-role behavior says should not exist.

This is a limitation worth taking seriously rather than noting in passing. A manager who treats a high volume of observed "citizenship" as proof of a healthy, high-trust culture has not actually distinguished a healthy culture from one where people have simply learned that declining is not a real option. The honest test, for any specific instance, is whether withholding it would be genuinely costless to the employee; where it would not, the behavior is better described as unrewarded in-role effort than as citizenship behavior in Organ's original sense.

The four ideas in this lesson are not separate chapters of a textbook; they describe the same workplace event from different angles. Power asymmetry determines who can afford to decline a request framed as voluntary: an employee with a weak BATNA, following Section 6's logic, is the person most exposed to compulsory citizenship behavior, because declining costs them more than it costs a colleague with better alternatives or stronger referent and expert power. A default of avoiding (Section 4) can itself be compulsory citizenship in disguise: swallowing a legitimate grievance because raising it would be read as not being a team player is formally indistinguishable, on a conflict-style questionnaire, from someone who genuinely prefers a calm workplace. And a negotiated settlement reached under unequal power, or without identifying the real interests underneath stated positions, tends to resurface later as manifest conflict (Pondy, Section 3) rather than disappear, because it has settled the paperwork without settling the felt conflict beneath it.

Lesson 21 established that behavior at work is a function of ability, personality and situational constraint, not simply attitude. Lesson 22 extended this to how perception and values filter the same objective event, a denied budget request, a blunt email, into very different felt experiences for different people, which is part of why Pondy's felt-conflict stage cannot be read straight off the perceived-conflict stage: two people can perceive the identical disagreement and feel very differently about it. Lesson 23's motivation theories, equity theory in particular, supply the mechanism this article has used repeatedly without naming it until now. An employee compares their inputs, including discretionary OCB, with their outcomes relative to a comparison other, and when compulsory citizenship quietly breaks that calculation without the employee being able to say so openly, equity theory predicts not gratitude but quiet withdrawal, reduced citizenship elsewhere, or eventual exit, which is the exact pattern Bolino and colleagues and Vigoda-Gadot documented. Lesson 24 described the everyday, often informal tactics, coalition-building, impression management, control of agendas, through which the power described in Sections 1 and 2 actually gets exercised, and the conflicts described in Sections 3 and 4 actually get fought out, below the level of any formal negotiation.

This leaves a genuine tension that nothing in this lesson resolves cleanly, and it is worth stating rather than smoothing over. A manager who wants a cooperative, high-OCB team faces a real dilemma: the moment citizenship behavior is formally measured, rewarded or made an explicit expectation, in the name of fairness and of not quietly exploiting it, it stops being discretionary in the sense the construct was defined to capture, and some of what the research credits it with, as a signal of genuine goodwill, as a buffer that holds precisely because no one can demand it, may not survive the formalization. Leaving it informal avoids that trap and reopens the exploitation risk this lesson has just described. Later modules in this series, on performance management and on total rewards, return to this trade-off from the compensation side. It is flagged here, not resolved, because resolving it would claim more than the evidence supports.

Select a workplace conflict you can examine closely: one you observed directly (disguised if needed to protect those involved) or one documented in enough public detail, through press reporting, a published case, or an organization's own account, to analyse responsibly. It should involve at least two parties with different formal standing.

Prepare a report of 2,000 to 2,500 words that:

1. maps each party's power using French and Raven's and Raven's six bases, with specific evidence for each base you claim applies, not an assumption based on title alone;
2. traces the dispute through Pondy's five stages, with evidence for which stage was actually reached and why an earlier or later intervention might have changed the outcome;
3. identifies which conflict-management style each party actually used, evaluates whether it suited the stakes involved, and discusses what a Thomas-Kilmann self-report might have missed or mislabelled, drawing on the instrument's documented limitations;
4. if a negotiation occurred, assesses it against Fisher, Ury and Patton's four principles, states each party's apparent BATNA, and says honestly whether the dispute was more distributive or more integrative in Walton and McKersie's sense; and
5. examines whether the resolution relied on any party's discretionary or citizenship behavior, and if so, uses Bolino, Turnley and Niehoff's and Vigoda-Gadot's critique to assess whether that behavior was genuinely discretionary or functioned as compulsory citizenship, stating your reasoning rather than asserting a conclusion.

Use at least five academic sources, including at least three from this article's reference list. State explicitly where information is unavailable and how that gap limits your conclusions, rather than filling the gap with assumption.

Assessment rubric (100 marks)

1. Bolino, M. C., Turnley, W. H., & Niehoff, B. P. (2004). The other side of the story: Reexamining prevailing assumptions about organizational citizenship behavior. Human Resource Management Review, 14(2), 229–246.
2. French, J. R. P., Jr., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in Social Power (pp. 150–167). Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.
3. Fisher, R., Ury, W., & Patton, B. (1991). Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (2nd ed.). Penguin Books. (Original work by Fisher & Ury published 1981.)
4. Hickson, D. J., Hinings, C. R., Lee, C. A., Schneck, R. E., & Pennings, J. M. (1971). A strategic contingencies' theory of intraorganizational power. Administrative Science Quarterly, 16(2), 216–229. Author/repository copy: pure.uvt.nl
5. Konovsky, M. A., Jaster, F., & McDonald, M. A. (1989). Using parametric statistics to explore the construct validity of the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Survey. Management Communication Quarterly, 3(2), 268–290. journals.sagepub.com
6. Organ, D. W. (1988). Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome. Lexington Books. Catalogue record: openlibrary.org
7. Organ, D. W., & Ryan, K. (1995). A meta-analytic review of attitudinal and dispositional predictors of organizational citizenship behavior. Personnel Psychology, 48(4), 775–802. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
8. Pondy, L. R. (1967). Organizational conflict: Concepts and models. Administrative Science Quarterly, 12(2), 296–320. Author-hosted copy: umich.edu
9. Raven, B. H. (1965). Social influence and power. In I. D. Steiner & M. Fishbein (Eds.), Current Studies in Social Psychology (pp. 371–381). Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
10. Smith, C. A., Organ, D. W., & Near, J. P. (1983). Organizational citizenship behavior: Its nature and antecedents. Journal of Applied Psychology, 68(4), 653–663. Record: psycnet.apa.org
11. Vigoda-Gadot, E. (2006). Compulsory citizenship behavior: Theorizing some dark sides of the good soldier syndrome in organizations. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 36(1), 77–93. Summary record: researchgate.net
12. White, J. J. (1984). The pros and cons of "Getting to Yes". Journal of Legal Education, 34(1), 115–124. jle.aals.org
13. Womack, D. F. (1988). Assessing the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Survey. Management Communication Quarterly, 1(3), 321–349. journals.sagepub.com

Other sources cited

• Blake, R. R., & Mouton, J. S. (1964). The Managerial Grid: Key Orientations for Achieving Production Through People. Gulf Publishing.
• Katz, D., & Kahn, R. L. (1978). The Social Psychology of Organizations (2nd ed.). Wiley.
• Kilmann, R. H., & Thomas, K. W. (1977). Developing a forced-choice measure of conflict-handling behavior: The "MODE" instrument. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 37(2), 309–325.
• Rahim, M. A. (1983). A measure of styles of handling interpersonal conflict. Academy of Management Journal, 26(2), 368–376. doi.org/10.2307/255985
• Shell, G. R. (2001). Bargaining styles and negotiation: The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument in negotiation training. Negotiation Journal, 17(2), 155–174. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
• Walton, R. E., & McKersie, R. B. (1965). A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations: An Analysis of a Social Interaction System. McGraw-Hill.

Verification notes: every reference above was checked against publicly indexed bibliographic records (publisher abstract pages, PsycNET, Wiley, SAGE, JSTOR-linked pages, or university/ResearchGate-hosted copies) via web search rather than a full-text read of each paper. Findings attributed to Konovsky, Jaster and McDonald (1989), Womack (1988), White (1984), Organ and Ryan (1995) and Bolino, Turnley and Niehoff (2004) are reported at the level of detail available in abstracts and secondary summaries; no numeric effect size beyond what is stated in the article text is claimed from any of them. The Teesta Logistics case, the tables, the diagnostic framing, and the synthesis connecting this lesson to Lessons 21 to 24 are original teaching material for this series.

This closes Module 05 of The Human Capital MBA. Module 06 turns to Leadership and Managerial Effectiveness, beginning with classical and contemporary leadership theories.