The Monica Ashley Case

As the project manager of “Project Hippocrates”, Monica had formal individual power which came from her position in HEAL-INC’s . She had legitimate power which was the formal authority to use company resources as well as its people to accomplish job-related tasks and duties. This power was granted by the president, Gary Dorr, when she accepted the position of project manager. She also had information power. As the project manager, Monica had access to and control over information including various reports and data supporting the idea of purchasing digital signal processor from an outside vendor. She also had more information about the changes of customers’ needs and competitors’ reaction to the changes. Her colleagues and subordinates therefore needed to depend on her to solve the problems they faced, which gave Monica the information power.
However, Monica lacked reward power and coercive power, which were at the hand of the president Gary Dorr. Monica couldn’t give pay rises, promotion and other form of rewards to colleagues or subordinates who had done well in the project. More importantly, Monica didn’t have the power to punish the ones who hurt team morale and obstructed the progress of the project by engaging in organizational politics, such as Ralph Parker and Ed Kane. In addition, Monica also lacked informal individual power came from personal characteristics and relationship but not legitimate authority. Monica lacked expert power as she didn’t have the expertise in designing and manufacturing of signal processors before taking up the project. Moreover, she was relatively inexperienced when compared with Parker and she had neither made major contribution to the company nor built close relationship with her colleagues and subordinates. She lacked referent power as she was less respected by the others than Parker.
On the contrary, Parker had high informal individual power including expert power and referent power because of his expertise in analog