Legitimate powers

Formal powers. Legitimate power is power based on one s position. It is a formal power, bestowed on a person through appointment, selection, or election. Legitimate power allows superiors to hire or fire a person, dicfafe job responsibilities, and confrol fhe work of an individual by virtue of fheir position. In an organization, the boss has legitimate power. 

In professional bureaucracies, fhe patient is the central focus. All members of the organization, or team, have a primary goal in mind — for health care professionals this is improvement in the health and well-being of the patient. As such, health care professionals and not the managers develop the standards by which the patient is cared for. However, one of the drawbacks to this model is the potential for conflict among the professionals themselves, because many of fhe professionals will exercise expert or charismatic power and (most likely) the physician has primary legitimate power. 

If our statutes were not formal on that point, the organisation of an Association which identifies itself with the woriting classes, would exclude from it every form of secret society. If the working classes, who form the great bulk of all nations, who produce all their wealth and in the name of whom even the usurping powers pretend to rule, conspire, they cor spire publicly, as the sun conspires against darkness, in the full consciousness that without their pale there exists no legitimate power ... 

As sugar placed in a porcelain sugar bowl remains sugar and the sugar bowl remains porcelain, without receiving legitimate powers and the pronunciation of sacred word the Eucharistic species remain what they were at their creation. 

A simple definition of authority is legitimate power and Max Weber saw authority and its legitimacy as central to the question of organisational structure. He maintained that authority exists when instructions are obeyed in the belief that they are legitimate, in other words that they are justified... 

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... 

Brutus SJ (1994) Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over the prince. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge... 

Proposition 5 Competence-based trust moderates the relationship between the partner s information, expert, referent and legitimate power and the firm s predisposition to share information and know-how. 

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