Bases of Power

Origins of the Bases of Power

The bases of power concept was developed at the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s. Raven was a graduate student there working closely with Leon Festinger, who was Raven's PhD dissertation advisor at the time. During this period, Festinger wrote an article concerning some of the reasons people agree to do things. In the article, he observed that when offered a reward or threatened with punishment, people will often change their behavior, but only when those trying to influence them can observe them—when not being observed, the requested behavior stops. However, Festinger also found that sometimes the new behavior continued whether or not someone was being observed. In this case, it appeared that personal beliefs as well as behavior had changed.

Raven's dissertation (completed with French as his advisor when Festinger left for the University of Minnesota) was, in part, based on factors that distinguished behavior change requiring continued observation from change that did not. After Festinger left Michigan, Raven and French began to look at additional factors that affected changes in personal beliefs from those that only affected observable behavior. With the leadership of Dorwin Cartwright, at this point most of the members of the Research Center for Group Dynamics began to study social power.

As members of the group, French and Raven continued their investigations into social power. Because of French's extensive background in industrial and organizational psychology, they concentrated on the relationship between supervisors and subordinates in a work environment. Using the work environment as a guide while examining both the experimental literature and their own experiences, they developed the bases of power model.

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