The Systematic Measurement of French and Raven's Bases of Social Power in Workgroups

A typology of five bases of social power developed by French and Raven (1959) has been used to study small‐group behavior in field settings by various researchers but interpretation of these data is limited by several methodological shortcomings. This study describes the development and testing of questionnaire measures for the Legitimate, Expert, Referent, Reward, and Coercive bases of social power and attempts to correct some of the scale format confounds that have affected previous empirical efforts. Analyses of Likert‐scaled responses from the 23‐item questionnaire show for the first time that these five constructs are factorially identifiable and orthogonal. Scale responses are shown to accurately reflect hierarchical status differences in an organization and to correlate significantly with such common leader behaviors as Initiation of Structure and Consideration.