Power to Empower:

Individuals & Teams

Made by: Gourav Updhayay

Meaning

Power is the• the ability or right to control people or

things• political control of a country or area• a person or organization that has a lot of

control and influence over other people or organizations

Types of Power

• Reward Power• Coercive Power• Legitimate Power• Expert Power• Referent Power

Types of Power

Reward Power:Reward Power is an individual's ability to influence others' behaviour by rewarding their desirable behaviour. Employees comply with requests and directives because of the authority of managers to grant rewards in the form of praise, promotions, salary increase, bonuses, and time-off. Reward power can lead to better performance, but only as long as the employee sees a clear and strong link between performance and rewards.

Coercive Power

Coercive Power:It is an individual's ability to influence others' behaviour by means of punishment for undesirable behaviour. For example, subordinates may comply because they expect to be punished for failure to respond favorably to managerial directives. Punishment may be major or minor, depending on the nature of omission or commission.

Legitimate Power

Legitimate Power: It is most often refers to a manager's ability to influence subordinates' behaviour because of the manager' s position in the organisational hierarchy. Subordinates may respond to such influence because they acknowledge the manager's legitimate right to prescribe certain behaviours. Legitimate power is an important organisational concept.

Expert Power

Expert Power:It is an individual's ability to influence others' behaviour because of recognised skills, talents, or specialised knowledge. To the extent that managers can demonstrate competence in analysing, evaluating, controlling, and implementing the tasks of subordinates, they will acquire expert power.

Referent Power

Referent Power:It is an individual ' s ability to influence others' behaviour as a result of being liked or admired. For instance, subordinates' identification with a manager often forms the basis for referent power.This identification may include the desire of the subordinates to emulate the manager. Referent power is usually associated with the individuals who possess admired personality characteristics, charisma, or a good reputation.

Relevance of power in society

If you define power the way John Gaventa does, power has a huge impact on our lives.  If you look at it in that way, the elites of society use their power every day to get us to buy into the ideologies that justify their power.  They use this face of power, then, to trick us so that we do not even realize that power is being exerted on us. 

If we see power in a more limited way, it is still with us every day.  Weber talks about power (among other ways) as the elite's ability to manipulate things so that they have the best life chances. We can see that every day in our own lives. If we are of middle to upper-middle class status, we know that our kids go to better schools than poor people's kids. At the same time, we know that their schools are not as good as the schools of the truly wealthy.  This, too, is an example of power playing a role in our daily lives.

Thank you