Coercive power

Legitimate, reward, and coercive powers are powers of position, or formal power. Expert and charismatic powers are considered informal or personal powers, derived from personal interactions and not by virtue of position. 

Toflfel (2004), Khanna and Speir (2007) propose that the interested parties use normative and coercive power to bring pressure on the enterprise, including pressures from the government, consumers, interest group pressures, competitors, and industry associations. 

Coercive power This refers to the use of punishment to influence others. It is not an effective method of influence in most organizations (see the section on punishment in Chapter 3), as individuals can usually find ways of avoiding the worst effects, and in most reasonably affluent societies people will simply not accept employment in a company where policies are too abrasive. It is used in organizations such as the military and prisons, where punishments are usually fairly swift and cannot be avoided, since once enrolled members cannot easily leave. It is also used by governments in the form of both the penal and the taxation system. 

The weberian definitions of power (see again Figure 1) are consistent with the basic definition of power as a relationship (power-over). The absolute form of power (macht) does not need legitimacy to be exercised and includes the extreme form of coercive power, violence. The legitimate power (herrschaft) is based on consensus obtained through a formal contract (bureaucracy), or by an informal contract (traditional power) or by faith. These definitions are useful to restrict the analysis of power to those kinds of power that cissiune the form of a rational... 

Molm, L.D., 1997. Coercive power in social exchange. Cambridge University Press. 

Indirect supplier development does not require the buyer to become actively involved in the supplier s processes, and it relies more on the buyer s coercive and non-coercive powers than on collaborative joint actions. The suppUer is motivated by its desire not to lose the buyer s business, especially if the buyer possesses significant market power. It responds by improving quality, cost, and fulfillment through a better management of time, labor, inspection, and sourcing. Wagner (2010) outlines six initiatives for indirect development of suppliers, as shown in Table 4.2. 

In addition, we conduct this research from the more dependent firm s perspective and study how trust and power affect this firm s predisposition to share information and know-how. In particular, we study the two dimensions of trust - competence and benevolence-based trust, instead of treating trust as a first-order construct. Also, we study the non-coercive power s effect on the firm s predisposition to share knowledge and the moderating role of knowledge s tacitness in competence-based trust and knowledge sharing predisposition. 

W. Ke and K.K. Wei (Trust and Power Influences in Supply Chain Collaboration) looked at the issue of information sharing from a socio-political perspective. They distinguished between two types of trust - competence and benevolence, and five types of non-coercive power, and studied their impact on firm s predisposition to sharing information and know-hows. They identified competence-based trust as more important for know-how sharing. 

---