BUS272 TB

278 Part 3 Interacting Effectively
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In India, Naina Lal Kidwai is a powerful woman in the
banking industry. She derives her power as Chairman
of HSBC India. Kidwai’s formal power is based on her
position at the bank.
someone who can distribute rewards that others view as valuable
will have power over those others. These rewards can be either
financial—such as controlling pay rates, raises, and bonuses—or
nonfinancial, including offering recognition, promotions, interesting
work assignments, friendly colleagues, and preferred work shifts or
sales territories. 13
Legitimate Power
In formal groups and organizations, probably the most frequent
access to one or more of the bases of power is through a person’s
structural position. This is called legitimate power . It represents the
power a person receives as a result of his or her position in the formal
hierarchy of an organization.
Legitimate power is broader than the power to coerce and reward.
Specifically, it includes acceptance by members of an organization of
the authority of a position. We associate power so closely with the
concept of hierarchy that just drawing longer lines in an organization
chart leads people to infer that the leaders are especially powerful,
and when a powerful executive is described, people tend to put the
person at a higher position when drawing an organization chart. 14
When school principals, bank presidents, or government department
heads speak (assuming that their directives are viewed to be within
the authority of their positions), teachers, tellers, and civil servants
listen and usually comply.
The Ethical Dilemma on page 303 asks you to think about how
much you should defer to those in power. The Milgram experiment, discussed in Focus
on Research , looks at the extremes individuals sometimes go to in order to comply with
authority figures.
FOCUS ON RESEARCH
A Shocking Experiment
legitimate power Power that a
person receives as a result of his or
her position in the formal hierarchy of
an organization.
Would you shock someone if you were told to do so? A
classic experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram studied the
extent to which people are willing to obey those in authority. 15
Subjects were recruited for an experiment that asked them to
administer electric shocks to a “student” who was supposed
to learn a list of words. The experiments were conducted at Yale University, and subjects
were assured by the experimenter, who was dressed in a white lab coat, that punishment
was an effective way to learn. The subjects were placed in front of an instrument panel
that indicated the shocks could go from 15 volts to 450 volts. With each wrong answer,
subjects were to administer the next-highest shock level. After the shocks reached a
middle level, the “student” started to cry out in pain. The experimenter would instruct the
subject to continue administering shocks. What the experimenter was trying to find out
was the level at which subjects would stop administering the electric shock. No subject
stopped before 300 volts, and 65 percent of the subjects continued to the end of the
experiment, even though, at the upper levels, the instrument panel was marked “Danger
XXX.” It should be noted that subjects were not actually administering shocks, and that
the “student” was actually a confederate and was simply acting as if in pain. However, the
subjects believed that they were administering electric shocks. This experiment suggests
that many people will obey those who appear to have legitimate authority, even in questionable
circumstances.