Influence in organizations: Testing an integrative model of agents' decision-making processes for selecting tactics

In today's global business environment, employees must frequently request information, manage cross-functional work teams, and champion new initiatives (Hartle, 1995). To meet these organizational objectives, employees need to influence their colleagues on a daily basis. A majority of the previous influence research had focused on the relationship between influence tactics and outcomes. Despite the fact that the use of different influence tactics led to different outcomes, it was still unclear how employees actually chose particular tactics. The purpose of the present research was to develop and test a comprehensive model of the decision-making processes employees used to the select the tactics they would invoke to influence their peers. To achieve these objectives, a hypothesized Influence Process Model was created and two studies were conducted.; Based on the previous literature, employees seemed to utilize several major factors in their decision-making strategies for selecting influence tactics. The hypothesized Influence Process Model incorporated these components and delineated specifically how employees may integrate them into their influence approach. These variables included: agents' perception of their power base, agents' previous influence experience, agents' perception of the impact of the request on their target, agents' perception of their target's trust in them, agents' anticipated outcome of the influence attempt, and agents' choice of influence tactics.; The first study involved measure development and assessment to establish and verify that all of the measures, which represented the variables in the hypothesized Influence Process Model, encompassed adequate psychometric properties. The second study entailed testing the hypothesized Influence Process Model, after ensuring that all of the scales representing the variables in the model remained psychometrically sound.; As a result of the scale development and assessment process, five new scales were developed and one scale was refined. Not only did these scales prove to be psychometrically sound, they represent a significant departure from traditional influence scales by measuring influence as a holistic, integrated process. Although the hypothesized Influence Process Model was not confirmed, the results from structural equation modeling provided substantial support for two new and informative influence process models: Respecified Influence Process Model for Successful Influence Attempts and Influence Process Model for Unsuccessful Influence Attempts. The results of this investigation also are discussed in terms of implications for future research and practice.