Power balancing efforts in professional bureaucracies: Relationships among expertise, autonomy, and social network

This dissertation investigates intra-organizational power-dependence dynamics, organizational politics, and social network relations in professional groups based on the assumptions of social exchange theory, social network theory and organizational design approach. Given their importance in power distribution, organizational design components are examined within the framework of Mintzberg's configurational approach. Then the question of which components in professional bureaucracies create a structural environment for political struggles between a bureaucratic system and autonomy is addressed. It is argued that sub-units in the operating core made up of professionals may increase their autonomy relying on their expert knowledge power, and thereby through the coalition strategy gain advantage in balancing formal and absolute power of the strategic apex. To support this argument, the relationships among the professionals' expert power, operational autonomy, group's network density, and in-group brokerage social capital are studied empirically, considering the in-group informal relationship patterns. To be utilized in the research, expert power rubric is developed and operational autonomy scale is adapted to Turkish. Their validity and reliability tests are conducted. To test the hypotheses on the relationship between the variables and on the sub-group differences, statistical tests and social network analysis are carried out. Data are collected from three sample sets comprising academics of a foundation university in Turkey. The first set includes the related university's senate members representing the strategic apex (n=33). They have scored the expert power of units operating under two faculties, and consisting of engineers (second sample set, n=84) and law professionals (third sample set, n=41). The second and third sample sets have provided quantitative data using the operational autonomy scale, and sociometric data concerning their in-group social relations. According to the findings of data analysis, the prediction that in-group mediator based social capital moderates the relationship between sub-units' expert power and their operational autonomy is supported in the engineers group, but not in the group made up of law professionals. Also, it is confirmed that densely connected sub-units significantly differ in their expert power, but expected sub-unit differences in operational autonomy are not proved.