The attributes of power and how it impacts safety performance

Positional (legitimate) power
    Positional or legitimate power also known as authority, is conferred upon a person by the organization and its extent is a function of the position one holds. The higher one is on the organizational chart the greater their power, giving them more control (influence) over a greater number of people. At one extreme is the Armed Services, with many ranks, dress codes, and rituals. At the other end are such organizations as academia, and businesses where things are rather informal and positions are downplayed.
    Culturally legitimate power works due to people becoming integrated into society, such as growing up in it. Experience with parents, in school with teachers, social norms and morays, interaction with law enforcement, to name a few. All these experiences set the stage and prepares us for entrance and successfully functioning in organizations where one has to deal with the exercise of legitimate power as a way to get work done.

Reward power
    Reward power emanates from legitimate power. Reward power holders can exert influence though their ability to affect positive outcomes such as rewards, and/or prevent negative ones. This may include recommend or give promotions or pay increases, plumb assignments, growth opportunities, provide positive feedback, public praise or recognition, to name a few.

Coercive power
    Coercive power is supported by legitimate power. It gives the power-holder the ability to exert influence by using or threatening punishment. Supervisors and managers might be permitted to block or hinder promotions, dock pay, assign unfavorable tasks, publicly chastise, and/or make the person’s work environment very unpleasant. But of note is the fact that the use of coercive power to control employee behavior may elicit an emotional side effect from the workforce and thereby make it somewhat ineffective.

Referent power
    People who are well liked in the organization poses referent power. People we like generally have some influence over us, we are prone to consider their points of view, seek their approval, ignore their failures, and use them as a role models, this increases the power of the referent power posser. Since anyone in the organization may be well liked irrespective of their position, this translates into just about anyone possessing some level of referent power which make this form of power rather unique.
    Friendly interpersonal relations often exert influence by also permitting it to extend across the whole organization, outside of the usual channels of positional authority. For example, it may enable a project safety manager who has developed a friendly relationship with another manager in the organization to get him involved, and providing assistance is resolving a potential barrier, situation or problem with project staff in a particular jobsite.

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Expert power
    A person has power when he or she has special knowledge or expertise that others in the organization need, want or value. However, the more crucial and/or critical this information or expertise is, the greater the expert power becomes. Expertise is acquired by employees who spend a long time doing similar things, solving problems, addressing impediments and gain special knowledge or experience.
    One of the more interesting aspects of expert power occurs when lower-level organizational members accrue it. Many secretaries acquire expert or informational power through long experience in dealing with other departments, clients, customers, and/or handle a significant amount or volume of information in their daily work. Expert power is a valuable asset for supervisors and/or managers and is most consistently associated with subordinate effectiveness.

Informational power
    Is similar to expert power, except that the information itself provides the power to the person possessing it and others wanting or needing it. For it to become a power base you need a steady and constant flow of new information, as well as a large variety of it. This requires the keeping of eyes and ears open while interacting with other departments, managers, supervisors, teams, clients, customers, other employees as well as the grapevine. Expanding one’s access to memos, e-mails and other documents.

Personal power
    If you do not have positional power and need to get other employees or peers to willingly comply with your requests or suggestions then having personal power comes into play. Individuals may use a version of reward (recognition) power such as doing something for another without their asking for it, a word of advice, a helpful observation, an atta boy, builds rapport. Well liked people have referent power which enables them to build trust, better empathic relationships and more effectively motivate cooperation. Those who effectively utilize personal power are often described as having charisma. They make a great first impression and have excellent interpersonal skills.
    One can build or enhance personal power by being compassionate, friendly, empathic, confident, and optimistic by their demeanor and comportment which is then reinforced by their effective use of language, the way they speak, the perspicacity of tone of voice and body language used enhances the way a speaker is perceived and accepted by others. People must find a way to create favorable impressions to enhance dealing with others, improve communication, facilitate exchange of information and understanding, in order to increase their personal power as well as effectiveness.

Power and safety
    The typical way construction project management is set up, the staff is given position power by the organization (power elements 1-3 above). Through their interaction with the workforce, they manifest some of elements 4-6 mentioned above. The safety of the workforce is assigned to the safety function, which generally is not given positional power. So they have to work at enhancing their personal power.
    From the workforce perspective, project staff has overall control of the project. The daily interaction they have with the staff generally covers operational performance and the meeting of production goals. Their infrequent interaction with the safety practitioner usually covers some form of shortcoming. This may involve an existing physical hazard, which usually was not created by the worker.
    Or the safety practitioner characterizing the way the worker is engaged in performing their task as an unsafe act and potentially resulting in an accident causing an injury. From the worker’s perspective this may make no sense as this is their trade and area of expertise. This is the way he has been doing similar work for a long time with no problems or negative consequences whatsoever.
    So, in order the effectively manage the jobsite safety outcomes, the safety practitioner must develop and utilize personal power along with expert power combined with effective communication skills with a strong focus on nonverbal communication to be able to effectively carry out their assigned responsibility as well as motivating staff and workforce participation in the achievement of project safety excellence.

Conclusion     
    To be successful organization must acquire competent people. Since much of the work is done in cooperation with others. The workforce must be willing to function well in groups, teams, or crews, assist others where necessary as well as where possible. To support and enable the workforce the organization must have competent managers who are able to accomplish organizational goals by skillfully planning, organizing, directing, staffing and controlling. With the safety function supporting preconstruction as well as construction operations to successfully address and control the risk of worker injury. This requires that they also need to understand the effective utilization of positional and personal power as well as enhance it with the proper use of the other sorts of power.
    For the company to excel in their work generating superior results they need the workforce to not only want to perform well, but be engaged and enthused in their work and want to apply their discretionary effort to become highly productive as well as working safely. This requires that their managers also have leadership skills; and be able to encourage and influence the employee’s willingness to follow as well as enable and excite them to generate superior results by creating an empathic and cooperative work climate using organizational power enhanced by personal power.