Power and politics at work: French & Raven's six bases of power

60-Second Summary

French & Raven (1959) named five bases of power: coercive, reward, legitimate, expert, referent. Raven (1965) added a sixth: informational.
Coercive and reward power produce compliance but not commitment. Legitimate power is brittle when authority is questioned. Expert, referent, and informational power produce internalized influence — durable but slow to build.
Senior leaders over-use their legitimate power and under-use expert and referent. New managers do the opposite — over-rely on expertise from their old IC role and under-use legitimate authority where it would be cleaner.
‘Politics’ in organizations is usually informational power asymmetry. Whoever holds the most context wins disproportionately — which is why information hoarding is the most common political behavior.
Use the six bases as a diagnostic: when you can’t get something done, ask which base you’re trying to use and which base is actually needed.

Power is the most under-discussed and most-used resource in organizations. French and Raven’s framework is sixty-five years old, still the best-supported taxonomy, and still missing from most management training.

The six bases

Base	Source	Mechanism	Example
Coercive	Ability to punish	Compliance under threat	Performance management, firing
Reward	Ability to provide valued outcomes	Compliance for benefit	Raises, promotions, recognition
Legitimate	Formal role or position	Compliance with authority	‘As the VP, I’m deciding…’
Expert	Specialized knowledge or skill	Internalization of expertise	‘She’s the one who actually understands the system’
Referent	Identification and respect	Internalization through admiration	Founders, charismatic leaders, deeply trusted peers
Informational (Raven, 1965)	Access to information others need	Internalization through reasoned content	The PM with the customer data; the analyst with the spreadsheet

Compliance vs commitment

Kelman’s (1958) classic distinction maps onto French & Raven cleanly:

Coercive, reward, legitimate power → produce compliance. Behavior changes while the power is salient; reverts when it isn’t.
Expert, referent, informational power → produce internalization. Behavior changes because the person now believes in the change.

Organizations that rely on compliance-based power have to constantly enforce it — meeting attendance, return-to-office mandates, ‘carrot and stick.’ Organizations that build commitment-based power do less enforcement and get more outcome.

How each base ages

Base	Half-life	Failure mode
Coercive	Days to weeks	Resentment, attrition, retaliation
Reward	Until the reward stops	Entitlement, gaming the metric
Legitimate	Until the authority is questioned	Reorganizations, level inflation
Expert	Until the field moves on	Skills obsolescence, ‘yesterday’s expert’
Referent	Years, if maintained	Brittle to integrity breach; rebuilds slowly
Informational	Until the information becomes shared	Hoarding behavior, lost when the right tool/dashboard exists

Patterns by seniority

New managers: over-rely on expert power (from their old IC role) and under-use legitimate authority. Symptom: ‘I can’t get my team to do X.’ Diagnosis: you’re trying to persuade where you should be deciding.
Mid-level managers: over-rely on reward power (promotions, comp). Symptom: top performers ‘only respond to comp.’ Diagnosis: you’ve trained them to.
Senior leaders: over-rely on legitimate power. Symptom: ‘I have to make every decision.’ Diagnosis: you’ve under-invested in expert and referent power in your team.
Founders: over-rely on referent power (their charisma and the origin myth). Symptom: things break when you’re not in the room. Diagnosis: you have not built legitimate or informational power into the org design.

What 'politics' actually is

‘Politics’ is the colloquial label for two specific phenomena, both predicted by French & Raven:

Informational power asymmetry — one person/team holds context others need to make decisions. Information hoarding is the dominant political behavior in knowledge organizations.
Coalition-building around referent power — actors who lack legitimate authority assemble influence by aggregating others’ trust.

If you want to reduce political behavior, transparency and accessible information are the highest-leverage interventions. Decision logs, public OKRs, open dashboards, and written-first culture flatten informational power asymmetry directly.

Using the model

Power audit for any stuck initiative

1
Identify what you’re trying to get done
‘I want X team to adopt Y system by Z date.’
2
Identify the bases you’re currently using
Are you mostly leaning on legitimate authority? Reward? Expert credibility?
3
Identify the bases the situation actually needs
Adoption requires internalization — expert + informational. You can’t legitimate-authority your way to enthusiastic adoption.
4
Identify the gap
Most stuck initiatives use compliance-based power for problems that require commitment-based power. The fix is investing in the right base, not pushing harder on the wrong one.

References

French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power — Studies in Social Power
Raven, B. H. (1992). A power/interaction model of interpersonal influence — Journal of Social Behavior and Personality

Written by Pawan Joshi.Sources cited inline.

First published 15 Jun 2026See site changelog →