This paper examines French and Raven's five bases of power—coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, and expert—as applied to a corporate case study. Using examples from three employees and their managers across marketing, accounting, and sales departments, the paper illustrates how each power base operates in practice. It also explores the concept of dependency, demonstrating how the degree to which one party relies on another determines the distribution of power within an organization. Together, these examples show that power is not solely top-down but can reside with employees as well as managers.
The paper demonstrates applied theory analysis: taking an established theoretical framework (French and Raven's taxonomy) and mapping each component onto specific case study evidence. This technique shows mastery of a model not just by defining its parts but by operationalizing them against real-world scenarios, a core skill in organizational behavior and management coursework.
The paper opens with a framing introduction that names all five power bases, then dedicates one section to each, moving from the most intuitive (reward) to the most nuanced (referent and legitimate). A final synthesis section on dependency ties the individual examples together, showing how power relationships are bidirectional. This structure — taxonomy first, application second, synthesis third — is well-suited to theory-application essays at the undergraduate level.
French and Raven described five bases of power within any given organization that can still be used today to define each person's social role. The five bases of power were defined as coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, and expert power (Tauber, 2007, p. 40). Each of these powers is visibly on display in the corporation described in the case study, and the corresponding definitions can be applied to the employees and managers discussed in the study. Understanding the role of each employee and manager will also help to illuminate the power and dependency relationship that exists between them.
Reward power is the easiest power to define. It involves the dispensing of rewards in return for action that benefits either the entire company or the individual manager doing the rewarding. Because it is so easy to understand, it is also the easiest form of power to recognize, and it exists at several places within Corporation A. The marketing department of Corporation A gives a large bonus to any employee who earns a superior rating on the yearly performance evaluation.
Employees 2 and 3 in the scenario also receive rewards from their superiors, though these are earned through other bases of power. Rewards are commonly combined with other forms of power to make them more meaningful to the employee. In the case of Employee 2, he receives a shortened work week, while Employee 3 was rewarded with the role of team leader.
Coercive power is similar to reward power in that someone does something they would not normally do either in return for a reward or to avoid punishment. Both reward and coercive power involve some manipulation of the employee (Tauber, 2007, p. 41). In the marketing department of Corporation A, the manager constantly reminds employees of the large bonus they can earn with a superior evaluation and, as a consequence, urges them to work beyond their mandated 40 hours per week. Because Employee 1 wants to pay for an expensive vacation, he works the extra time in hopes of securing the superior evaluation and the corresponding large bonus.
Expert power is best described as the offering of expertise in a certain field in exchange for a reward of some kind. Employee 2 is the sole CPA in the accounting department and the only one who can prepare the company's financial statements. In exchange for that expertise, the accounting manager has allowed him to work a four-day work week — the only person in the department permitted to do so.
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