Leadership and Power in the Local Community
At the core, leadership is basically about influence, and leaders play an important role in establishing a just and healthy climate in their communities. So, it makes sense that communities that want to move ahead in a positive direction must be careful to elect leaders with integrity. There is, however, a difference between leaders who are appointed and have what is called “legitimate” power and leaders that emerge because they have other sources of power. The truth is, duly elected leaders are not always the most influential in local communities. In fact, with few resources available to them, these leaders oftentimes cannot even enforce or reward good behavior.
On the other hand, charismatic but toxic leaders can emerge that have access to resources, oftentimes gained illegally, and play a more significant role in nurturing a climate that is unhealthy and even downright criminal and dangerous. Let’s consider the six sources of power: coercive, reward, referent, legitimate, informational and expert. With coercive power, leaders use threats and bullying to force followers to do precisely what the leader wants them to do. Though this kind of power engenders fear and is not effective in today’s work environment, it is largely effective in local communities where life and death may be at stake. Reward power provides something of value to followers for engaging in certain types of behaviors. In local communities where toxic community leaders have access to rewards based on illegal activities or because of their relationships with politicians, reward power is important. This type of power should be deemed even more important because of poverty or the basic lack of material goods needed for everyday survival. The need for resources and a sense of belonging drives poor inner city residents to tolerate the harmful behavior of the politicians and emergent community-based leaders.
With referent power, the leader is able to build loyalty and attract followers who respect and admire the leader and who wants to gain approval. When toxic leaders are flashy, appear powerful, and seem to have unlimited access to scarce resources, they can easily exert referent power as they become the “ideal” or the role model especially for vulnerable youth.
With coercive, reward, and referent power at their disposal, toxic community-based leaders are able to wield an unprecedented level of overall power. In this environment, legitimate leaders who have been given formal leadership titles may have little influence on followers in the community.
Let’s now consider the final two forms of power. Informational power exists when there is access to information that others do not have. Expert power is when a leader has in-depth information, knowledge, or expertise in the area in which they are called to work. Expert power is often considered the most effective type of power. Even though it is much more likely that toxic emergent community leaders may have access to more sources of power that the legitimate community-based leaders, the impact of legitimate community-based leaders can be significantly increased. This needs to change and can change if individuals and organizations with more access to resources and that can provide capacity building support can come alongside local leaders to provide greater access to informational and expert power sources. In additional, because of the needs that exist in marginalized communities, greater access to resources also increases the reward power available to legitimate leaders.
At the national level, it is never enough for leaders to just espouse the right ideology. Neither is it enough to just take the right public action in terms of writing new legislation and imposing stricter penalties to deter the criminal behavior of gangs.
“The persistent facilitation of gang activity by politicians continues to hinder targeted violence reduction efforts, despite the government’s vociferous public condemnation of crime and violence and official support of both punitive and social approaches to violence reduction”
Jamaica remains a small island in the Caribbean known for its beauty, its coffee, its reggae music, and myriads of friendly, delightful people. With authentic transformational leadership, it is conceivable that the island could one day be also known for the courage and resilience of a new breed of political and community-based leaders who will provide their people with unprecedented opportunities for spiritual, physical, and emotional growth and healing.