Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and author of Power: Why Some People Have It—And Others Don’t, cites three barriers that cause executives to shy away from using power to extend their influence.
1. The belief that the world is a just place: If you do a good job and behave appropriately, do you assume things will take care of themselves? When others make self-aggrandizing, envelope-pushing power plays, do you dismiss them instead of watching to see if you can learn something?
Believing in a just world makes you less powerful by:
a. Limiting your willingness to learn from all situations and people — even those you don’t like or respect
b. Anesthetizing you to the need to proactively build a power base — an outcome that blinds you to potentially career-damaging landmines
2. Leadership literature and popular business books: Many successful authors will tout their careers as models to emulate, but they’ll often gloss over the power plays they’ve used to get to the top.
3. Your delicate self-esteem: Any experience of failure puts their self-esteem at risk. If you fail to actively seek and gain power, you won’t view your lack of it a personal failure — a phenomenon known as “self-handicapping.”