BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 90
Feser / When Execution Isn’t Enough / 2
Chapter 3: The Science of Influence
“Inspirational appeals are the most effective
influence tactics in getting people to commit to
action.”
Leadership is influence.
—John C. Maxwell
Influence has long been recognized as an essential element of leadership. A
commonly used definition of leadership states that leadership is “a process of social
influence in which one person is able to enlist the aid and support of others in the
accomplishment of a common task.”1 Influence is a primary social mechanism through
which a leader enacts his or her leadership.2
Ample literature and research addresses the science of influence. Notably, leaders
turn to the theory of influence, based on the principles of reciprocity, commitment, and
consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity, developed by Robert Cialdini,3 a
psychologist at Arizona State University, or to the study of influence tactics by Gary
Yukl, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany.
In the early 1980s, Kipnis, Schmidt, and Wilkinson initiated one of the main streams
of research on influencing behavior.4 They spearheaded an empirical approach for
studying the process of influence by collecting critical incident reports in which people in
a work setting described how they “got their way” with someone else in their
organization. Leveraging these reports, they developed an instrument called the Profile of
Organizational Influence Strategies (POIS)5 to measure the frequency with which various
people within organizations use specific influencing tactics. This original instrument has
been used and refined over the last 30 years to provide a solid foundation for our
understanding of the influencing behaviors that people actually use in the workplace.6
This stream of research has led to the identification of nine influence approaches, that
is, inspirational appeals and eight others. Three of them are known as “hard” tactics, and
six of them as “soft” tactics. They are shown in Figure 3.1.
