The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Intercollegiate Center for Management

This is a chapter about power in groups and organizations. In the following pages, we suggest that the analysis and exploration of the complexities of organizational power by managers and workers is both necessary and useful. We begin by discussing three of the prominent theoretical perspectives on power from the literatures of social and organizational psychology and critical management studies. We then outline some of the dilemmas and challenges faced by executives, managers and workers around empowerment, disempowerment and organizational democracy. Then, building on the seminal works of Follet, Deutsch, Tjosvold, Clegg, Mumby and others, we offer a framework of organizational power which views power as a multifaceted phenomenon; as thoughts, words and deeds which are both embedded within and determining of a complex network of relations, structures and meaning-making processes at different levels of organizational and community life. Such a framework enables us to understand the relational aspects of power and authority within the context of the macro structures and ideologies that give them meaning. It can also help identify those domains in organizations where the potential for sharing cooperative power is, in fact, not

Using a critical review and empirical reanalysis of the published data on the relationship between psychological empowerment and employee performance, our study reports tha t compelling evidence in support of direct, positive and significant effects of employee empowerment programs is lacking. In order to understand this weak relationship and to identify possible conditions that are likely to enhance the relationship between empowerment and performance, three potential ideas are suggested including (1) an alternative modeling of empowerment, (2) attending to a source of misspecification in conceptualizing empowerment itself, and (3) considering alternative dependent variables that may contribute to organizational effectiveness.