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Keywords Leadership, Health services, Management theory
Abstract The author's role as a nurse consultant in a Mental Health Trust in the north of England is particularly interesting because of the peculiar position of the nurse consultant. One of the main components of the role is leadership, yet they are not operational managers so cannot draw on traditional positional power as a way of influencing people. This led the author to explore the concept of power andits implications for leadership. The paper is the result of this exploration: it reviews theories of power and how these can be applied to an understanding of leadership.
Introduction
The first thing one encounters when trying to understand power is a difficulty in arriving at a concise definition, as there are many and varied definitions and perspectives seeking to explore and explain the concept. Writers as different as Mullins (2002) or Handy (1993) from the managerialist perspective, and Foucault (1969, 1980) from a poststructuralist perspective, offer contrasting and incompatible theories. For Clegg and Hardy (1999) this superfluity of perspectives is no surprise as:
Depending on who is studying it, what they are studying and why they are studying it, those voices are often looking at different phenomena or, at the very least, looking at the same phenomenon through very different lenses (p. 382).
When setting out to understand power I therefore thought it wise to follow Martin's (2002) advice, as she suggests that listening to only one paradigm can "blind" any prospective line of enquiry. If I were to develop a more in-depth awareness of power and its potential implications for leadership, I would need to explore what the "different" lenses are, i.e. firstly what the different perspectives have to offer on the subject of power and secondly their implications for the role of the leader. Gender issues are another important consideration when examining power dynamics but it has not been possible to explore these issues in this paper.
Given the foregoing, the aim of this paper evolved into the development of a greater understanding of the concept of power through exploring power from a modernist, Marxist and post-modern perspective. Space allows the exploration only of French and Raven's (1959) view of power as an example of the modernist...