Week 10

Week 10

This week I created my own lesson. For the past few weeks the lessons focused on leadership and different factors of it. In my opinion one of the most important factors of Good leadership is understanding your power bases. There is Five bases of power that make up a persons overall power base. They are Expert/Knowledge, Referent, Reward, Legitimate/Legal and Coercive. I had the cadets for their homework research the 5 power bases in order to participate in a class discussion.

Expert/Knowledge = The power derived from the leader's accumulation of knowledge, skills and capabilities. 

Referent = The power derived from the leader's personality and is effective as a means of influencing soldiers to the extent they respect and admire the leader.

Reward = The power derived from the capacity of the leader to provide desired rewards to a soldier for good performance.

Legitimate/Legal = The power derived from law and regulation.

Coercive = The power which influences a person to perform or behave in a manner contrary to how that person desires to behave at the time.


I had the cadets as a class discuss what order of importance these should be placed in.Two factors, that are important to understand is first, you use all five as a strong leader and second, you need to look at this model from top down not bottom up. They discussed and argued which is more important and which are not. In the end it is up to the individual to develop their own leadership style off these bases of power. Some are weaker than others. Referent and Expert are the two that should be relied on most and Legitimate and Coercive should not be relied on as much.