Formal and Personal Power, Explained

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Formal and Personal Power

Foundations of Leadership · Chapter 6: Leadership Power, Styles & InfluenceSection 6.5 · lesson 31 of 9010 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

Why a title confers less capacity than it appears to, and why people without one can move whole organisations.

  • Separate power from authority and from influence
  • Name French and Raven's five bases of power
  • Explain what each base is for and what it costs
  • Diagnose which bases a leader is actually drawing on

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Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,453 words). Read along, or search it.

Leadership Power, Styles & Influence

Formal and Personal Power

There is a puzzle at the centre of every organisation chart. Some people with senior titles turn out to have almost no real influence. And some people with no title at all can move an entire company. The framework that explains this is more than sixty years old. In nineteen fifty-nine, John French and Bertram Raven set out to map where a leader's capacity to influence actually comes from. They found five bases, and a split that runs right through them. Three of the bases belong to the role. Two belong to the person. That split is the subject of this section.

The Distinction

Power Is Not Authority

Before the five bases, a distinction that gets lost in ordinary speech. Power is the capacity to affect the behaviour of others. It is a capacity, so it counts whether or not you ever use it. Authority is something narrower. It is the formally granted right to make decisions and issue commands, within a defined scope. Authority is one source of power. It is not the only one, and it does not guarantee influence. Picture a manager with full authority to set her team's targets. If her people do not respect her judgement, she may have almost no power to make those targets stick. The reverse happens just as often. A senior engineer with no formal authority over priorities may shift them easily. Because everyone trusts his technical reading of the problem. Keep those two words apart, and the rest of this chapter becomes much clearer.

The Frame

Five Bases, Two Sources

French and Raven's claim was that all interpersonal power traces back to one of five bases. Legitimate power. Reward power. Coercive power. Expert power. And referent power. What makes the framework useful is not the list itself. It is the line they drew through the middle of it. Three of the bases are tied to the position a leader occupies. The other two travel with the person, regardless of role. That is the distinction between formal power and personal power. And it explains the puzzle we started with. High-titled leaders sometimes hold only formal power. People with no title can hold a great deal of the personal kind.

Formal Power

Three Bases Tied to the Role

Take the formal three first, because they are the familiar ones. Legitimate power is the right to give instructions because of the role. A manager directs their team because the position grants the right to do so. Reward power is the ability to grant benefits that followers value. Salary. Promotion. Recognition. Interesting work. Coercive power is the ability to impose costs on those who do not comply. Written warnings, performance plans, termination. Each of these is real, and useful in the right doses. But notice what they share. None of them persists if the role is removed. The former chief executive loses all three the moment the title goes. Which is one reason leaders who rely on formal power alone tend to fade quickly out of office.

The Reframe

Power Lives in the Follower's Head

Here is the part of the framework people most often miss. It is tempting to talk about power as something a leader has. Like a budget, or an office, or a parking space. French and Raven's work says power is nothing of the kind. Power is a relational property. It exists in the perception of the followers. Not in the head of the leader. Consider a manager whose team has stopped believing her rewards mean anything. She has already lost reward power. Her title is unchanged. Her budget is unchanged. The power is gone anyway. This is why a power audit is more useful than confidence about title. Ask honestly which bases you currently command in the eyes of your team. The answer is frequently uncomfortable, which is exactly what makes it worth asking.

Personal Power

Two Bases Tied to the Person

The remaining two bases travel with the individual. Expert power derives from credible knowledge or demonstrated skill. A surgeon's authority in a clinical team owes less to their title. It owes far more to twenty years of successful operations. Referent power derives from admiration, identification, or trust. Followers comply because they want to be associated with the leader. Or to win their approval, or to emulate their character. Neither of these is conferred by the organisation. Both must be earned, and usually earned slowly. And both can be lost instantly, through a single public mistake or breach of trust. Their compensating advantage is durability. Expert and referent power outlast titles, promotions, and in some cases entire careers.

The Payoff

Compliance Versus Commitment

So why does the split matter in practice? A long line of research, including Yukl's syntheses, keeps finding the same result. Personal power produces commitment. Formal power tends to produce compliance. Those two words are doing serious work, so be precise about them. Compliance is behavioural conformity, without internal endorsement of the goal. Commitment is internal endorsement, the kind that survives when nobody is watching. Compliance is genuinely enough for some work. Where the task is specified, and the leader can observe execution, conformity does the job. Commitment matters wherever the work involves discretion, judgement, creativity. Or persistence beyond what anyone can directly see. Modern knowledge work is densely discretionary, almost by definition. Which is why formal power without personal power produces a brittle kind of leadership. It looks intact right up to the moment it needs to hold weight.

Case

The CEO Who Couldn't Move the Engineers

A case makes the failure concrete. A new chief executive at a software firm wanted engineering effort redirected. Away from a legacy product, and onto a new platform. His instructions were clear. His title was unambiguous. His reward and coercive powers were fully intact. Six months in, the platform had barely moved. What he had underestimated was not resistance. It was somebody else's power. The founding engineer held deep referent and expert power, and quietly believed the platform bet was wrong. So the engineers were complying with the chief executive. And committing to the founder. The correction is the interesting part of the case. He brought the founding engineer into platform leadership as a true co-author, not a co-signer. That combined his formal power with the founder's personal power. The platform shipped within the year.

Compare

What Each Base Is For, and What It Costs

It helps to see all five bases laid out against what each one costs. Legitimate power fits routine decisions inside your scope of authority. Its cost is that it erodes if you exercise it outside that scope. Reward power is for recognising and reinforcing behaviour you want more of. Its cost is that followers may start working only for the reward. Coercive power is for stopping clearly unacceptable behaviour. Its cost is steep. Each use depletes referent power. Expert power fits decisions requiring judgement inside a domain. It is slow to build, and it can be lost with a single confident error. Referent power is what sustained commitment and change leadership run on. Its cost is that it demands continuous personal credibility. Notice that no base is free. The question is always which cost you are willing to pay here.

In Practice

Two Ways Leaders Get the Mix Wrong

Mature leaders draw on both kinds without treating them as substitutes. There are two ways to get the mix wrong, and both are common. The first is the new manager who leans entirely on legitimate power. Within a few months she discovers that nobody is implementing her decisions with care. Formally, everything is being done. Substantively, very little is. The mirror error is the respected expert promoted into a formal role. Sometimes they refuse to use any formal authority at all, hoping personal power will carry it. That works right up until a decision arrives that personal credibility alone cannot make. The practical guidance is short. Develop both consciously. Use the minimum power necessary in any given situation. And remember that every use of coercive power spends down a store of referent power. A store that is much slower to replenish than it is to deplete.

Case

Mary Barra at General Motors

For a case where both kinds of power were visibly required, look at Mary Barra. When she became chief executive of General Motors in twenty fourteen, the company was in crisis. It was navigating the deadly ignition-switch recall. Her formal power as chief executive was necessary, and radically insufficient. Her response drew heavily on personal power instead. A long internal career had given her unusual expert power on manufacturing and engineering. And a reputation for direct, plainspoken honesty translated into referent power. Both inside General Motors, and with regulators. She did use her formal authority, firing executives implicated in the cover-up. But the deeper culture shift could not be ordered. Engineers volunteering early reports of defects, and the Speak Up for Safety programme. Those depended on followers believing that she meant what she said. The case is instructive because you can see the two kinds of power doing different jobs. And neither one could have done the other's.

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Foundations of Leadership carries a NCCRS credit recommendation. These universities work with NCCRS; some are UPI Study's signed partners. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Formal and Personal Power

What are French and Raven's five bases of power?
John French and Bertram Raven identified five bases of power in 1959: legitimate, reward, coercive, expert, and referent. Legitimate power is the right to give instructions because of a role. Reward power is the ability to grant valued benefits, and coercive power is the ability to impose costs for non-compliance. Expert power comes from credible knowledge or skill, and referent power comes from admiration, identification, or trust.
What is the difference between formal power and personal power?
Formal power comes from a position, while personal power travels with the individual. Legitimate, reward, and coercive power are formal and disappear when the role is removed. Expert and referent power are personal: they must be earned, usually slowly, can be lost through a single public mistake, and can outlast titles. This explains why some senior people have little real influence while people with no title can move an organization.
Why does personal power produce commitment while formal power produces compliance?
Research, including Gary Yukl's syntheses, finds that personal power tends to produce commitment and formal power tends to produce compliance. Compliance is behavioral conformity without internal endorsement of the goal, which is enough when tasks are specified and execution can be observed. Commitment is internal endorsement that holds when nobody is watching. It matters most for work involving discretion, judgment, creativity, or persistence, which describes much of modern knowledge work.
Is power something a leader owns or something followers grant?
Power is a relational property that exists in the perception of followers, not something a leader owns like a budget or an office. A manager whose team no longer believes her rewards mean anything has lost reward power even though her title and budget are unchanged. That is why an honest power audit, asking which bases you actually command in your team's eyes, is more useful than confidence in a title.

About the Foundations of Leadership course

How many college credits is Foundations of Leadership?
Foundations of Leadership (Business 205) carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
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$250, paid once, with lifetime access: all 90 video lessons, a practice quiz after each, the graded work and final exam, and an official transcript when you finish. Students who want several courses choose UPI Study PRO instead.
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