Power and Influence in the Workplace

TUI U

niversity

Jessica J. Barker

Module 2, Session Long Project

Organizational Behavior and Teamwork

Dr. Philip Rux

Power and influence in the workplace can mean a great deal to your success or failure as a leader toward your subordinates. The French and Raven model is based on five bases of power: Legitimate Power, Reward Power, Expert Power, Referent Power, and Coercive Power. Each one of these bases of power has a different meaning to each and every different type of leader. I will break these down in my own work place, how I function using these and how I may not want or prefer to use these different types of powers.

I do not feel I personally use legitimate power as a manger or supervisor. As a manager or supervisor I have never had enough power for me to feel like it is legitimate power, I feel that leaders who think that they have legitimate power are very afraid of losing that power. Once you have that much power it would be an extreme hurt to the ego to lose that power, if they did not have this power they would have no leadership. I could lose my leadership position and still be good at what I do as a "worker-bee" yet takes charge when it is needed.

I think most subordinates work well with reward power, a task may get done faster or with more quality if they employee knows there will be a reward at the end. I feel in my line of work I have a lot of control over rewards that mean something to my subordinates. When things are done in a timely and quality manner I have the opportunity to give something back to them: time off. As Soldiers we value our time off more than anything, after long deployments, field problems, distant and long schools, time off is the only thing of value just short of promotions that will make a Soldier perform. I know that when I was a young Soldier growing up in the Army I would do almost anything if it meant I was getting off work early. I would run faster in the battalion run in the hopes that for doing well I would be rewarded with time off.

I think my strongest leadership quality is that I can lead with expert power; I would never expect my subordinates to do something I did not know how to do. I generally like to figure out something before handing the task off. If it is going to be a recurring task I will figure it out first so that I can be the subject matter expert and then train to the standard. I also do not want to be the kind of leader that does not know what my Soldiers are trying to do and cannot answer questions to help them because I do not know how to solve the problem myself. I think my Soldiers appreciate that their boss knows what they are going through and has all the answers to help them.

Referent power makes me think