Nobody knows exactly how leadership works, it is intangible. What we know is the result. And the result is that good leaders can influence the behaviour of others, their subordinates. And the means to do that are provided by power that the leader utilizes.

There are seven bases of power that are defined for us by Hersey, Blanchard, and Natemeyer (1979). Those are:

• Coercive power – the power based on fear. A leader with this power rules with punishment of every possible kind.
• Connection power – the power based on powerful connection. A leader with this power has strong connections with important people and his subordinates comply with him out of fear of disfavour from the powerful connection.
• Reward power – the power based on the possibility of reward. People comply with the leader who possesses this power hoping to get rewarded.
• Legitimate power – the power of position. People often comply with leaders who are placed above them by a higher authority. The higher the position the higher is the power.
• Referent power – the power of personal traits. Nice and good person with good personal qualities is an example for others and people like to be associated with him or her.
• Information power – the power of possession of information. A leader with this power base has unique access to information valuable to others.
• Expert power – the power of knowledge. The more is the expertise of the leader, the more skills he possess the higher is his/her power.

What is even more curious is that it is relatively easy to determine the best type of power to utilize with a team. It depends on the maturity of the team and maturity here means the ability and willingness of individuals on the team to make their own decisions and to take responsibility for their actions. The least mature team will best comply to the coercive power, and as the maturity level of the team rises leader should move to the next power base in the list right down to the expert power, which will bring best results with the most mature team.

Software development teams are usually rather mature. And if we take for example small teams of professionals who may, for instance utilize Scrum as their process, these teams will usually be on the very high level of maturity. Developers in such teams usually can make their own design decisions and can take responsibility for these decisions. That is why very often in highly skilled teams we see that senior or principal developer have most of the authority and establish the direction of the product. Not managers, who usually simply provide input for the team in a form of simple requirements for a product. A simple advice for leaders in software development teams is to try and get information or expert power over developers and they will comply with you.

References

Hersey, P., Blanchard, K. H., and Natemeyer, W. E. 1979. Situational leadership, perception, and the impact of power. Group & Organization Studies; 4(4) pp. 418-428.