Power

In the Company of Women
by Pat Heim, Ph.D., Susan Murphy, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 4)

Power is the ability to get things done. It is extremely important: without power you would find it impossible to reach your personal and professional goals. In 1959, psychologists John French and Bertram Raven at UCLA identified six kinds of power that both genders utilize inside and outside the workplace:

• Reward power: the ability to give something to someone. You can reward another with a promotion, gifts, or praise. You have something that she wants.

• Coercive power: the ability to punish someone, to demote her or otherwise harm her career progress. Derogatory comments can also fall under this category.

• Legitimate power: power conferred on you by the organization. You are given the title of vice president or appointed manager of the department or leader of the team.

• Expert power: power derived from your unique abilities or skills. You're the only person in the office who knows how to fix the computers, or perhaps you have expertise in managing the boss.

• Referent power: power based on your personal affection for or identification with another person or group. People do as you ask simply because they like and trust you. You have referent power over a friend who wants to please you.

• Associative power: power derived from whom you know and how you associate with them rather than what you know (expert power). You gain power by dropping names.

Power exists in relation to someone or something else but never in a vacuum. It can be a double-edged sword, especially for women in the workplace, because it's much more straightforward for men to wield power on the job than for women. When men take command of a situation, they're perceived as resolute and authoritative. They are focused on winning and will often take charge. These can be positive, even comforting, attributes in a crisis. We might respect a powerful man, especially if he can provide structure and direction to a group during a time of confusion.

But women are in a more precarious position when they try to appear powerful. Unfortunately, power and friendship don't easily mix among women; acting as if you have power can skew female relationships. Friendship implies giving to another person and sharing, whereas power can result in your taking from the other person or directing her activity. To women, these do not feel like friendly actions. In fact, these behaviors could be perceived with downright hostility. Consequently, if you exert your power on the other women at the office in the same way that men do, you can easily provoke a catfight.

The Perils of Mixing Friendship and Power

Men more often experience "friendliness" with their co-workers, rather than friendships. They tend to be guarded when it comes to divulging intimate information about themselves to co-workers for the sake of their own survival in the hierarchical business world. Moreover, they are more apt to focus on their professional goals as well as on their own political survival in a corporation while women are often more focused on keeping their relationships with others intact.

Because relationships are so important to women, referent power (the power of friendship, mutual affection, and trust) can be more important to us than to men. And it's also the type of power that may be the most problematic. Women have much higher expectations of power sharing with those they are closest to than men do. Consider the following scenario: Your friend and former co-worker is promoted. She suddenly has more conferred legitimate power than you do. Chafing from the imbalance, you may feel tempted to withhold affection (your referent power), and a destructive conflict can ensue.

Or the opposite can occur: You genuinely like one of your employees and give her lots of leeway in her use of time. Such an employee can have a good deal of referent power over you. In fact, you may fear disturbing the friendship if you speak up, but you do eventually note that her work is slipping. Using your legitimate power, you talk with her about her unacceptable performance. You begin to use coercive power when you bring up her yearly evaluation. (She knows there are negative consequences to your disapproval.) As a way of evening out the power play, she withdraws her referent power from you. She goes to lunch with others without inviting you, throws work on your desk instead of handing it to you, and responds curtly when you ask about her family.

Some women managers will even back off from following through on discipline because they fear the damage it will do to their relationship with a female employee. The bottom line: you can't let referent power drive your management behavior, even though it may be attractive.

Chip Theory: Women's Unique Path to Power

It's wise to approach power in a distinctively female way in order to make it work for you. For example, consider the use of what Patricia Palleschi, a vice president at the Walt Disney Company, calls Chip Theory. This is based on a sense of equity: each of us is endowed with a certain number of chips of power-positive attributes or actions-that we constantly exchange with others. We possess, give, and get these power chips in three ways:

• Interactions: Saying "Hi, how are you?" whenever you meet a co-worker. Taking a genuine interest in her family, vacation, or new project at work.

• As a birthright: Some people are simply born with lots of chips-think of the Rockefellers. Fortunate chip-rich folks may be blessed with good looks, talent, great intelligence, athletic prowess-inherent qualities.

• Active acquisition: People proactively seek out chips. They will obtain an MBA or Ph.D., or they'll strive for the title of vice president. Some may marry handsome or rich significant others to increase their store of chips, or they'll frequent plastic surgeons who can artificially enhance their chip bank accounts by tucking their tummies or lifting their sagging eyelids and chins.

© September 2001, J. P. Tarcher, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc, used by permission.

About the Author

Dr. Pat Heim is an internationally known speaker and consultant. Her Los Angeles firm, Heim & Associates, has been providing services in the areas of leadership, communication, team building, and gender differences to hundreds of organizations, including AT&T, the Los Angeles Times, General Motors, the American Medical Association, and Price Waterhouse. She has a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Colorado.

Susan Murphy, Ph.D., MBA, is the president of Energy Engineering, Inc. Heim and Murphy speak about workplace gender issues to more than 50,000 individuals each year.