A Study Of Lateral Influence Tactics In Organizations: Questionnaire Development And Survey

Interpersonal influence can be interpreted as the processing which people influence others in the daily social activities and hoping to achieve personal goals. Organizational situation considered as the typical place which interpersonal behavior appears, most of the people, however, in the organizations lack of formal power to influence others. For example, in the situations which subordinates influence their supervisors or co-workers influence other co-workers, the influencer lack of power to make the objects commitment. So the successful of influence mostly depend on the interpersonal influence skills. The use of influence tactics (the ways or skills which people take to influence others) can be regarded as the indicator of influence ability. Influence tactics were received much attentions from employee, employers, and organizational researchers for many years due to its key roles related to peoples'interests in organizations.Lateral influence tactics are similar to upward and downward influence tactics, the only difference is the influence directions. Lateral influence tactics influence the objects whose class level in organization is same to influencers, namely the objects of lateral influence tactics were co-workers. The types of lateral influence tactics in Chinese organizations are different from Western countries due to the difference of culture. In Chinese organizations, for example, the frequency which people influence their co-workers used the Chinese characteristic influence tactic "personal relationship" may not lower than the frequency of influence their supervisors or subordinates. People in organizations influence their co-workers used the personal relationship tactic for the purpose of getting personal rewards or supports were much more common in Chinese organizations. Because the supports and commitments from co-workers were more and more helpful to one's successful in organization. So the pervasive behavior of influence co-workers appears to be a normal phenomenon in Chinese organizations. For the reason above, the study of lateral influence could be a meaningful experiment.Based on the study of literature, conduct a survey of open questionnaire and a simple interview, then propose the hypothesis of dimension structure of lateral influence tactics. Through the development and revise of preliminary questionnaire, the formal questionnaire of lateral influence was developed.506 employees were investigated used the formal questionnaire, the data was split into two parts randomly. One part of data were analyzed by method of explore factor analysis (EFA), another part of data were analyzed by method of confirmative factor analysis (CFA). EFA extracted 5 factors as a result, and the CFA result showed that the model of 5 factors was fitted well to the data, confirmed the rationality and stability of the 5 factor lateral influence tactics model. Statistic analysis of data gets the results as follows:(1) The structure of lateral influence tactics includes 5 factors as follows:personal relationship, rationality persuasion, flattery ingratiation, image management and benefits exchange.(2) The reliability and efficacy of lateral influence tactics questionnaire were both meet the psychometric standard, it can be served as a useful tool which applied to measure the lateral influence tactics.(3) The mean scores of all respondents in the lateral questionnaire were higher than average level. The result showed that the contribution of demographic variables to lateral influence tactics were varied from different dimensions of lateral influence.