hi everybody and welcome to the online lecture for chapter five our textbook authors make the important point that power and leadership are interdependent but not interchangeable leadership is impossible without power but merely having power doesn't make you a leader for purposes of this discussion we're defining power as the ability to influence others now i found a lot of times students think of power as a negative thing it is not it is benign you could use it in positive or negative ways but power in itself is not necessarily a bad thing i've often found in leadership interview papers that i've received in this class that when students ask their interviewee about power how do you exercise power or what are your thoughts on power a lot of times they get a negative response like oh i don't believe in using power over people or i don't believe i have power i think that's a misunderstanding of power it's thinking of it as a negative thing as a forceful thing and a forceful kind of power is only one of many many types that we will be looking at we're going to be discussing a number of different kinds of power each one has a name and specific characteristics that go with it so you want to know the definitions of each of these and be able to explain a circumstance in which they would be used the types of power that we're going to be looking at are coercive reward legitimate expert referent information and ecological and in the slides coming up i'll spend some time explaining each one of these at length so let's take a look at some specific examples of the different kinds of power that are discussed in our chapter the first one is coercive power which can be broadly thought of as the power to punish it's the power to make something negative happen to somebody else so if you have the authority to create a negative consequence for somebody and they comply with you in order to avoid that negative consequence that would be an example of exerting coercive power on a societal level we have punishments for crimes those would be an example of coercive power they're intended to be a deterrent with a leadership situation you might have an employee that has a history of absenteeism and you might tell that person okay in the next month your percentage of absenteeism has to come down or i'm going to reduce your pay that would be an example of wielding coercive power over somebody else on an everyday level you might have a teenage son or daughter and you might tell them if you break curfew again i'm going to take your car keys away from you now assuming that the loss of the car keys is something they would like to avoid and that you have the authority to do that to them you would be exercising course of power in that example reward power is the flip side of that the ability to make something positive happen to somebody to give them something that they want so in the case of leadership you might have the power to give your employees a bonus a raise a special treat of some kind in exchange for a certain behavior that you want to reinforce an example might be if everybody meets their sales quota this month will have a special lunch or there will be a bonus for everybody or to tell an individual employee if your performance improves in this area you will qualify for a raise something like that legitimate power the important thing to remember about legitimate power is that it rests in the position not in the person and here's what i mean by that the president of the united states whoever that is is invested with certain kinds of power the power to do certain things and we have seen different individuals come in and out of the presidency but it's the office of the presidency that confers that power on a person so whether or not the individual in the office is necessarily liked or respected they still have the power to do certain things another example of that is a teacher is the instructor of record on this course i present myself to you as your instructor i say we're going to be doing certain activities and assignments in this course and that's how you're going to earn your grade and it wouldn't matter if it was me or somebody else by occupying the position of instructor i have the authority to do certain things same with supervisors at work you start a new job they tell you that person over there is your boss that confers a certain amount of authority to them and you're in your mind right away okay another important thing to think about with legitimate power is that this power is reinforced by an organization there's kind of an organizational structure behind this power for example as the instructor of record on this course i have the authority of western michigan university behind me conferring any power that i have to me it's important to understand the difference between legitimate power and this next one expert power expert power is held by a person who has a special skill and because you want the benefit of that skill they have the power over you to uh to share that skill with you or not here's an example imagine if you have a child that you want to learn to play the piano and you have a neighbor that you know plays the piano beautifully so you go to the neighbor and say will you give piano lessons to my son and the neighbor is thinking it over and deciding whether or not they will do it and how much they will charge in that example the neighbor has expert power because they have a special skill um another example might be your car breaks down your brother-in-law is a good mechanic you ask him if he will fix your car and he says i want x amount of money and that might be more than you want to pay but you want your car fixed right away that person has expert power over you so remember with legitimate power the one before this that president or teacher might not have specific expertise they may but they may not doesn't matter it's their position that's conferring their power whereas with expert power it doesn't matter who this person is where they fall on an organizational hierarchy or where they fall on the the social ladder it's that special skill that gives them a power because other people would want to avail themselves of that talent referent power is power held by somebody that you admire so because you like them you would like to be like them or you would like to impress them or to please them you will comply so if you have a boss that you really admire they might have referent power over you advertisers use this all the time when they get a celebrity to endorse a product the idea is because the public likes a celebrity they will want to use the product because they want to be like this person who finds the product beneficial you might have an older sibling a cousin some other friend or relative who has gone to a particular college or has gone into a particular career and because you admire them you want to do that yourself those are good examples of referent power note that someone could have both referent power and legitimate power or both referent power and expert power and next comes information power this is the power you have when you know something that other people would like to know and you get to decide whether and when to disclose it so we'll say that information power is the power to decide who gets to know what and when in a workplace situation think of maybe there's going to be layoffs and you are a department manager and you know who is going to lose their job and when that announcement is going to take place other people would like to know that it affects their lives so you have information power in that case and then finally ecological power ecological power is control over the physical environment and think of environment kind of broadly here okay you have charge of the resources the technology how the work is organized you might have charge over the actual layout of a workplace um what duties people do who gets money for new equipment things like that so in controlling that physical environment in a myriad of ways would give you ecological power on page 143 of our text there is a great chart that gives the costs and benefits of these different kinds of power and explains them in a little more detail circumstances under which you might want to use them and pros and cons of choosing each type so i recommend you examine that chart and think about the kinds of power that you have used in the past in the kinds of power that have been wielded over you and how you have reacted to those so when studying the types of power make sure that you not only can define each one but you can give an example of when it might be used and that you are clear on the difference between some that are easy to confuse for example legitimate and expert power are often easy to confuse so make sure you understand the characteristics of each one coercive and reward flip sides of the same coin and legitimate and referent can sometimes be confused as well just because someone has legitimate power does not mean they would also have referent power so make sure you're clear on the similarities and differences there our textbook authors present us with an interesting idea in powerless talk you might remember back in the first chapter we looked at the symbolic nature of leadership and how leaders make choices in the way they present themselves and those choices give an impression to followers about what kind of leader they are powerless talk is something we want to try to eliminate from our speech because it does give an impression of weakness so what is powerless talk well there's some great examples in the book i like to think of it as words or phrases that sound like you're hedging for example if you say i could be wrong about this but or this is only my opinion but or the word just i i would just like you to do this could you just do this for me or a lot of vocal fillers like um and uh which is one of the reasons when you take a public speaking class you're encouraged to try to work the vocal fillers out of your speaking i've worked on it for years i still haven't gotten rid of all of them but it's something i try to be conscious about all of those powerless words and powerless phrases can give a negative impression to listeners so you want to develop a keen awareness of when you are using those now let's turn to the idea of empowerment we touched on this a little bit when we were looking at transformational leadership but let's explore the question a little more deeply as to why leaders would want to share or give away power to their followers if you're using an authoritarian leadership style in a given situation it might not be wise to share or give away a lot of your power but under a democratic leadership style you might want to share and give some of that away and here are some of the benefits from doing that it can lead to increased job satisfaction greater cooperation among your followers because they feel that they have a personal investment in the work environment and in deciding their own own fate they're able to engage in some growth and learning so they can advance in their career and learn new skills and it can help keep power abuses in check if power is more evenly distributed throughout an organization so with that it's time to go and work on the task list and as always if you have any questions or problems or anything about the chapter material that you would like to discuss further shoot me an email and i will get in touch with you see you in the next module