An empirical investigation on the effect of managers ’ influential tactics on their staff : A case study of banking industry

Article history: Received Feb 28, 2013 Received in revised format 19 September 2013 Accepted 23 October 2013 Available online November 23 2013 The organizational employees take some actions called influential tactics to achieve their goals. Influential tactics discuss the ways to influence power bases and help employees understand how to utilize these bases. This research aims at analyzing the effect of managers’ influential tactics on employees. The influential tactics used in the research include friendship, reasoning (reasonable encouragement), coalition, pressure (courage), resorting to superiors and interaction. The research has been accomplished through quantitative descriptive method and the sample size is selected from the private and state banks of an Iranian city named Ilam. The statistical sample consists of 265 randomly chosen people determined using Morgan Table. The collected research data has been analyzed using Spearman correlation test. The research results showed that the effect of managers’ influential tactics was not the same on male and female employees. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
The emergence of this global view, which needs an efficient management to direct the organizational activities in an optimal way, as well as to avoid wasting energy and organizational capital, paved the way for management experts to design and to collect various views and perform necessary investigations to improve organizational performance.Following different worldwide intellectual, social, cultural and economic changes and improvements, many intellectuals and experts strongly have concentrated on the issue of leadership and its different patterns and methods as a social necessity.Humanities' intellectuals have discussed the concept of leadership in terms of various perspectives.Some of them considered it as a part of management, others defined it as the process of influence and the relationship between leaders and managers who intend to cause real changes because of their real purposes (Noorbakhsh & Mohammadi, 2003).
Influence is a term generally implemented by management theorists to describe behaviors happened through interpersonal power.Many researches have focused about the effects of leadership on influential behaviors rather than focusing on power (Yukl et al., 2002).Some theorists refer to influence as a combination of two concepts; surrender and encouragement.In this definition, surrender means behavior modification and encouragement means conceptual modification (Allen et al., 2002).Other theorists have defined influence as the change in possible happening of pleasant results (Allen et al., 2002).Manager as the leader of the organization can choose different ways to direct human force.The managers' suitable behavior patterns can create a high spirit and strong motivation among the staff of the organization and increase job satisfaction (Mosadegh rad, 2008).
Stogdil defines leadership as the process of influence in both group and individual activities done in a special condition to achieve a special goal or goals.Definitely, power is one of the ways that can help leaders influence their followers' behavior.Power is the ability to influence others.It is a source enabling the leader to encourage others to accept responsibility and to be obedient ( Noorbakhsh & Mohammadi, 2003).Managers use power and influence to cause modification in the behavior of the organization's staff, to get them obedient, to increase their sense of duty for difficult projects, and finally to ensure that duties were accomplished efficiently (Yukl, 2002).
In general, experts have divided influential tactics into eight parts: pressure or pursuance, resorting to superiors, interaction, forming coalitions, attracting attention, reasonable encouragement, inspirational demand, and consulting.There are so many reasons why influencing others seems to be more important nowadays than any other time; managers need to better understand how they can take advantage of their human force.On the other hand the staff want to know how they can better express their ideas, achieve their goals, and gain other's support and interest (Williams & Anderson, 1991).This research generally aims at analyzing the influential tactics used by Ilam's bank managers, as well as introducing the most used tactics.Even though social and behavior researchers have already emphasized social influence, it has not been focused well in works about organizational theory and behavior.Of course, it does not mean that it is ignored in organizational sciences, but it means that considering the processes of influence have been extremely limited over the last years.On the other hand, declining influence is an issue that has well been introduced over years.Other important processes of social influence, which follow side purposes, could not gain so much attention (Porter et al., 2003).Therefore, it is necessary to do essential and fundamental researches about organizational management and human force regarding to the location of each province.

Main hypothesis
There is a significant difference between the effect of manager's influential tactics on male and female staff of Ilam's private and state banks.

Subsidiary hypotheses
1-Friendship is one of the manager's influential tactics, which has a significant impact on private and stats banks' employees in city of Ilam.2-Reasoning is one of the manager's influential tactics, which has a significant impact on private and stats banks' employees in city of Ilam.
3-Coalition is one of the manager's influential tactics, which has a significant impact on private and stats banks' employees in city of Ilam.4-Pressure is one of the manager's influential tactics, which has a significant impact on private and stats banks' employees in city of Ilam.5-Resorting to superiors is is one of the manager's influential tactics, which has a significant impact on private and stats banks' employees in city of Ilam.6-Interaction is one of the manager's influential tactics, which has a significant impact on private and stats banks' employees in city of Ilam.
Fig. 1 demonstrates the structure of the proposed model.

Fig. 1. Conceptual model of the research
The purpose of this research is applicable and it has been done through descriptive method survey strategy.The information has been collected theoretically and the literature review shows that both field and library study have been used.Questionnaires have been used to collect data and the collected data has been analyzed using SPSS software and formulas of descriptive statistics including frequency, mean, standard deviation, and inferential statistics like Spearman's correlation test and regression.The staff of Ilam's private and state banks ( 847 people ) have made the statistical population of the research.The statistical sample is composed of 265 randomly chosen people determined using Morgan Table .Cronbach alpha coefficient was 89.5, which shows that the questionnaire was acceptable.Symbolic content validity method was used to determine the validity of the questionnaire so that the advisers and consultants could study and modify the initial design of the questionnaire and confirm its validity.

Descriptive data
The collected data has been analyzed using SPSS software and formulas of descriptive statistics including frequency, mean, standard deviation, and inferential statistics like Spearman's correlation test and regression.In our survey, 223 people were male and 37 of them were female.In addition, more than half of the people were young and they hold at least a bachelor of science.

The results
Table 1 demonstrates the summary of the results of our investigation using correlation ratio between six factors namely, friendship, reasoning, coalition, pressure, resorting to superiors and interaction with male employees.According to the above table for Spearman's correlation between manager's tactics (friendship, reasoning, coalition, pressure, resorting to superiors and interaction) and influencing male employees, as well as based on the achieved level of significance ( P< 0.001) which is less than α= 0.01, with %99 probability, it can be said that there is a significant relationship between the mentioned tactics and influencing male employees of Ilam's private and state banks.In other words, the above influential tactics have a significant effect on the male employees.Table 2 demonstrates the results of Spearman's correlation between manager's tactics, namely friendship, reasoning, coalition, pressure, resorting to superiors and interaction, which are influencing female employees when the level of significance is one percent.Based on the results we can conclude that there was a significant relationship between the mentioned tactics and influencing female employees of Ilam's private and state banks.In other words, the above influential tactics have significant effects on the female employees.However, the research result does not hold for the tactic of friendship, when the level of significance is five percent.Therefore, it can be concluded that there was not any significant relationship between the tactic of friendship and influencing female employees.That is why the null hypothesis is accepted and the statistical hypothesis is rejected.According to the results of Table 4, the degree of freedom and the level of significance for female and male employees are (P-Value = 0.04 & F = 8.875) and ( P < 0.001 & F = 41.637 ), respectively.The result also explains F, as a significant statistic, which shows that variables create an appropriate model for influencing the staff.According to the results of Table 6, the coefficient of variables used in regression and comparing coefficient of Beta, and based on the results of regression analysis, it can be said that manager's tactics influence on male employees.The manager's tactics, which are influencing female employees, include pressure, coalition, reasoning, interaction and friendship respectively.In other words, the male employees are the most influenced by reasoning tactic (0.343%) and the least influenced by the tactic of pressure (0.163%), while the female employees of Ilam banks are the most influenced by the tactic of pressure (0.51%) and the least influenced by the tactic of friendship (0.142%).Therefore, the main hypothesis of the research is accepted meaning there is a difference between manager's tactics used for influencing male employees and tactics used for influencing female ones.

Conclusion and suggestions
Considering the research results about analyzing the effect of manager's influential tactics on employees, based on the accepted hypotheses, and regarding the fact that there is a positive and significant relationship between each tactic and the influencing the staff, managers of private and state banks are suggested to take the following actions: -Managers should pay enough attention to employees.
-Managers should behave friendly.
-Managers should use friendly statements to encourage the staff to do their duties.
-To satisfy the staff, managers should use true information, charts and statistics.
-Managers should clarify evaluation basis and processes.
-Before stating new instructions, managers had better consult with subordinate managers and staff.-Sometimes managers need to state their requests decisively.
-Since putting pressure may have an opposite effect on the staff's behavior, managers are suggested to avoid violence.-Managers should award the staff based on their good or poor performance.
-Managers should ensure that there is a direct relationship between the amount of awards and the staff's performances.
Personal characteristics of the participants

Table 1
The summary of Spearam's correlation matrix between manager's tactics influencing male employees

Table 2
Correlation matrix between manager's six tactics and influencing female employees

Table 5
The coefficient of variables used in the regression equation for the male employees

Table 6
The coefficient of variables used in the regression equation for the male employees