Understanding the political threats to IT implementation: a case study

Viewing organizations as political coalitions has a long history in management studies and has generated a great deal of research on the roles of organizational politics and power in decision making. IT researchers have followed the general trend by providing structural functional accounts of politics, power, and control strategies. All such studies are constrained by the lack of a general theory of human behavior. In this paper we present a case study of power and politics in a large financial transactions company. Unlike other studies of IT implementation, however, we add a general theory of human behavior/spl minus/known as action science/spl minus/to explain political maneuvering within the organization. We focus on the thinking and actions of senior executives noting their honest disagreements, personal conflicts/competing goals, and the real and imagined consequences of their actions. We conclude with a discussion of how to manage organizational politics and power relationships.<>