Thursday, December 1, 2011
Power
Last class we talked about what gives a person power and what types of power someone can wield. When we were discussing it, i thought back to last summer when I was a camp counselor. I started to think what kind of power I had over the young kids I was put in charge of. I definitely had legitimate power over the kids due to my position but some of the kids usually did not notice that. So i had to rely on Coercive power. If a kid continued to misbehave, I had the power to apply punishment (it usually was a timeout, a talk with my boss, decrease in pool time, or no seconds for lunch). Thinking back i had to really on this power a lot for some of them. I also had a co-counselor. It was his first year and he generally followed my lead because I had more experience working there. I held expert power power over him even though by the third week of so he became used to the way things were run, so by then my expert power became almost obsolete.
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I can relate to you a lot with this situation. Last year I worked at the day care on campus as a substitute teacher. While the children were only 3-4 years old that I worked with I also had to rely on coercive power. I think this may be due to the fact that kids have not experienced very much of life, or been put into the positions were they can appreciate the kinds of power we discussed. Authority figures are just seen as a sign of repression to them; you're my counselor so I have to listen to you seems to be their mind set. I have so much respect for those people going to school for elementary ed. haha
ReplyDeleteThis is a common problem because as you exercise your power you risk losing what gave you that power. With the kids they are easily coerced because of their age and mental ability so they will likely risk as much as they can if they are ok with their punishments. With your colleague you held seniority over him but as he learned from you and easily fell into the norm he was able to cut that expertise power out of the situation. I feel that in business we need to have almost all of the powers we discussed in order to maintain the power. If we look at leaders like Jobs and Trump they have all these powers and exercise them as needed so they always have power.
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