The Context of Interunit Influence Attempts

The authors thank Elaine Romanelli, Arie Lewin, and the editor and anonymous reviewers of ASO for their constructive criticism of previous drafts of this manuscript. We also thank Dick Lake, Blair Sheppard, and Anne Tsui for their collaboration in collecting the data. Support during the writing and revision stage was provided by the Roy J. Carver Entrepreneurial Fund of the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. This paper proposes and tests a model that predicts the extent to which members of organizational units will engage in ongoing attempts to influence the design and operations of other units, documenting interunit behavior that may be explicitly or implicitly political. The proposed model is thus derived from organization design perspectives on political behavior. The model predicts that resource constraints and lowered commitment to the status quo trigger influence activity within a set of related units and that this influence activity, along with other facets of interunit relationships (communication, formalization, and coordination uncertainty), in turn predicts the extent of a specific unit's influence attempts. Findings from a well-controlled test on 295 management units in 46 divisions of a large organization generate strong support for the model and tend to disconfirm rival explanations.'