Summary Of Carolyn Abravanel Merger

Unlike Bill Bailey, Scott is clearly already supportive of the new merger, as he is one of the early instigators of the merger conversation. However, Carolyn Abravanel - the wife of the orchestra's late founding father - is openly opposed to the merger. Scott must leverage the equity theory to persuade Mrs. Abravanel to support the merger. As described by the research of J. Stacey Adams, equity theory explains why people do what they do based on perceived inequality or lack of justice. (Guerrero, Andersen, & Afifi, 2014) Adams asserted that people value fairness and are motivated to maintain it within an organization. Specifically, people assign a perceived ratio of the contributions of an employee (also called inputs) to the outcomes to

Mrs. Abravanel's opposition in the merger is deeply rooted in her equity theory motivation. Her public comments regarding her late husband's likely disapproval of the perceived marginalization of the orchestra reveal her underlying assumption that the orchestra is getting an unfair outcome her husband's efforts through the years. It likely isn't the simple fact of the merger that Mrs. Abravanel opposes; instead, she opposes the idea that the orchestra director, a position her husband founded and pioneered, would be ranked below the current opera director, even though the orchestra is currently the much larger and more accomplished organization of the two, a condition in equity theory called negative equity. The orchestra put in more valuable effort and therefore should get a better outcome than the opera, but since that isn't the case, Mrs. Abravanel holds a perceived

Positional power is the authority granted a person by her title or rank in the organization. Because Anne is already the director of the opera, she holds a strong degree of control over whether the merger will proceed as proposed. Because of her level of authority, she holds veto authority (along with the director of the orchestra) over the merger. Additionally, her proposed role as the CEO over the new organization would also bring with it a new measure of control to make the kind of changes that she believes need to be made in order to effectively leverage the efficiencies of scale and elimination of redundancies that were driving the merger conversation. Personal power, on the other had, is the degree of influence one has because of who they are, irrespective of their positional authority. The best example of personal power is this: there's a reason you're more than willing to give a friend a ride to work or to the store when you won’t even consider giving a ride to a stranger on the street. Our relationships with others compel us to behave in a certain way. Like positional power, the greater degree of personal power one has, the more likely employees are to behave in the intended manner. However, the degree of influence between personal and positional power is vastly different, as personal power is