French and Raven's Power Bases was originally composed of five bases. These included Legitimate, Reward, Expert, Referent, and Coercive(Kovach, 2020). Six years after the initial results, Informational power was added to as an extra base of power. This power states that a person's power comes from controlling the information that is needed to conclude a task from others (Connor, 2020). The article "Situational Leadership, Perception, and the Impact of Power" agrees with the first six bases of power but expands to include connection power.

Connection power is when the individual's connections to important people influence the amount of power they have. In other words, when someone's alliance is desired or admired by others due the high level of influence that connection has in an organization or setting (Hersey, Blanchard, & Natemeyer, 1979). This power is all about networking which relates it heavily to social identity theory. We draw our identity from the social groups in which we belong(Van Ness, 2021). In this case, as individuals associate with higher influential people, they not only pull from that power but they start to identify with that group as well, thus expanding on the power that they are gaining by association. Another way of looking at this is to view it as politics. I have a connection to someone that you want to meet with or discuss a topic about, that's going to give me power. In order to make an agreement, we make coalitions with others expanding the power and expanding out social circle.

The article, after discussing the power bases, has an interesting point about how the original power bases can be expanded on. Originally, it was stated that each person responds to each type of power differently, some more positively and others not so much. This article breaks down the powers into the situational leadership categories. They go on to state that some powers work better for different situations and motivational levels. For example, connection power works best with the telling and selling leadership styles (Hersey, Blanchard, & Natemeyer, 1979). It would be interesting to see how this has changed since the article was written back in 1979 and to see what more can be expanded on it now.

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