How Do People Gain Power? Dominance, Prestige, Expertise, Networks, and Status
Updated: 3 days ago
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 24, 2026 · Editorial Policy
People gain power when other people become meaningfully dependent on them for valued outcomes: resources, information, expertise, access, coordination, protection, opportunities, or decisions. That dependence can arise in very different ways. Someone may impose costs through dominance, attract voluntary deference through prestige, become valuable through expertise, occupy a strategically useful position in a network, accumulate status and trust, or receive formal control over resources through an organizational role. These routes can reinforce one another, but psychology does not treat them as interchangeable.
The strongest contemporary evidence also complicates the familiar idea that powerful people simply “take” power. A 2025 systematic literature review found that power, status, dominance, and prestige are frequently blurred even in research and measurement, despite referring to distinct aspects of hierarchy Körner, Overbeck, & Schütz, 2025. A 2024 meta-analysis of 276 samples and 56,153 participants likewise found that social rank and influence emerge through several pathways, including competence, dominance, virtue, and what the authors call micropolitics: behaviors that make competence or virtue more visible to others Grosz, van Aert, & Back, 2024.
So the psychologically useful question is not “What personality type becomes powerful?” It is: what creates control, dependence, deference, and influence in a particular social system, and how do those mechanisms become recognized by other people?
What Does It Mean to Gain Power?
In social psychology, power is commonly defined in relational terms: one person has power to the extent that they can affect another person's outcomes, often because they control resources or consequences that the other person values. Power therefore exists in a relationship and a context. A manager can have substantial power over promotions while having little power over a specialist whose expertise the manager cannot replace. A well-known expert can shape professional judgments without holding a formal office. A socially central employee can influence what information reaches decision-makers without having the highest rank.
This relational logic goes back at least to Richard Emerson's classic power-dependence theory. Emerson argued that the power of A over B is rooted in B's dependence on A, and dependence rises when the outcomes controlled by A are highly valuable and alternatives are scarce Emerson, 1962. This remains one of the clearest ways to understand how power is acquired: increase the value of what you can provide or withhold, reduce others' alternatives, increase your own alternatives, or gain a position from which important exchanges can be coordinated.
That definition immediately separates power from several neighboring concepts. Status is the respect, admiration, and voluntary deference granted by others. Dominance is a route to rank based on threat, force, intimidation, or the credible ability to impose costs. Prestige is rank granted because others value a person's skill, knowledge, success, or qualities and want access to them. Authority is power viewed as legitimate within a rule, role, or institution. Influence is an effect on another person's attitudes, choices, or behavior; it can arise from power, status, persuasion, identification, information, or other mechanisms. Personal control is control over one's own life and circumstances, which is psychologically important but is not the same thing as power over others.
A major review of organizational hierarchy similarly treats power and status as distinct bases of rank: power concerns asymmetric control over valued resources, whereas status concerns social esteem and respect Magee & Galinsky, 2008. For a focused comparison of power with legitimate rule-based influence, see Power vs Authority: Weber, Legitimacy, Influence, and Obedience.
For the broader scientific construct, see Social Power: Definition, Types, French and Raven, Keltner, and Modern Psychology. For the boundary between resource control and social esteem, see Power vs Status: Social Power, Prestige, Dominance, and Hierarchy; for the wider architecture of rank, see Social Hierarchy: Power, Status, Dominance, Prestige, and Rank.
The Core Mechanism: Power Grows From Dependence
Power is easiest to understand when we ask what would happen if a person disappeared from an interaction. If nothing important changes because many substitutes are available, that person's structural power is limited. If their absence blocks access to money, approval, expertise, customers, information, coordination, safety, or a scarce opportunity, dependence increases. The source of power is therefore not merely an internal trait. It is a relationship between a person's resources and the needs and alternatives of others.
This is why the same person can be powerful in one setting and peripheral in another. A technical expert may be indispensable during a system failure and much less influential in a decision unrelated to their knowledge. A senior executive may control budgets but depend heavily on a small group of employees who control critical information. A community member with no formal title may become central because many otherwise disconnected groups rely on them to coordinate action.
French and Raven's classic analysis of social power made a related point from a social-psychological perspective. They distinguished several bases through which one person can influence another, including reward, coercion, legitimacy, expertise, and identification or referent power French & Raven, 1959. Their framework is historical theory rather than a complete modern map of power acquisition, but it captures a durable principle: the same observed influence can rest on very different relationships.
When the question shifts from where power comes from to how mutual influence and dependence are organized inside an interaction, see Power Dynamics: Psychology of Influence, Dependence, Status, and Control.
Route 1: Dominance — Power Through Threat and Cost Imposition
Dominance is one route to social rank. In contemporary dominance-prestige research, dominance refers to rank gained through force, intimidation, threat, or the capacity to impose costs. Prestige, by contrast, relies on freely conferred respect for valued qualities. Across two influential studies, Cheng and colleagues found that both dominance and prestige were associated with perceived and behavioral influence in groups, even though the two routes involved different social strategies Cheng et al., 2013.
Dominance can work because a credible threat changes other people's options. If defying someone carries a high expected cost, compliance may become the least costly choice. In that sense, dominance can create power without admiration. It can also produce visible rank because people attend to individuals whose actions may be consequential.
Yet dominance is not a synonym for power. Dominance is a strategy or basis of rank; power is the resulting capacity to affect outcomes. A person can behave dominantly and still lack meaningful power if others can ignore, exit, resist, sanction, or replace them. Conversely, someone can possess substantial power without using dominant behavior at all.
The durability of dominance also depends on social context. Cheng's 2020 review describes dominance as relying on coercive capacity and prestige as relying on persuasive capacity grounded in valued knowledge or ability, and notes that dominance hierarchies face counter-dominance pressures that can make coercive rank less stable Cheng, 2020. This does not mean dominance always fails. It means the cost of maintaining coercive control, the availability of coalitions, and the legitimacy of resistance matter.
A further complication is that dominant behavior can create an appearance of competence. Anderson and Kilduff found that people higher in trait dominance attained influence partly because they behaved in ways that made others perceive them as more competent, even after actual task ability was controlled Anderson & Kilduff, 2009. This finding is important because it separates actual expertise from competence signaling: confidence and assertiveness can affect who is heard before a group has perfect information about who is right.
For the direct comparison of these two rank strategies, see Dominance vs Prestige: Two Routes to Status, Influence, and Leadership.
Route 2: Prestige — Power Through Valued Skill and Freely Conferred Deference
Prestige represents a different path. People grant attention and deference to someone whose knowledge, abilities, achievements, judgment, or other valued qualities make that person worth learning from or associating with. The crucial psychological feature is voluntary deference. Followers do not defer primarily because resistance is costly; they defer because access to the prestigious person is useful or desirable.
This route is especially important in knowledge-intensive groups. Someone who repeatedly solves difficult problems, teaches useful skills, predicts outcomes accurately, or improves collective performance can become a reference point for others. Over time, the group may give that person more attention, consultation, discretion, and influence. In Cheng and colleagues' work, prestige and dominance were both viable routes to social rank, but prestige was specifically tied to expertise and respect rather than intimidation Cheng et al., 2013.
Prestige is not identical to being liked. Respect can be granted to someone who is not especially warm or popular, and popularity can exist without deference on consequential decisions. Prestige is also not identical to power. A highly admired scientist may have little formal control over a budget, while an administrator with resource authority may have power without equivalent prestige.
Group norms influence whether prestige-generating behavior is rewarded. De Waal-Andrews, Gregg, and Lammers found that routes to status differed depending on whether a group's hierarchy was more dominance-based or prestige-based: agentic behavior promoted status across conditions, whereas communal behavior was more status-enhancing in prestige-oriented hierarchies de Waal-Andrews, Gregg, & Lammers, 2015. The broader lesson is that a route to rank only works when the group recognizes the underlying behavior as valuable.
Route 3: Expertise — Becoming Valuable and Difficult to Replace
Expertise creates power when other people need knowledge or skill that is both relevant and scarce. French and Raven called this expert power: influence based on the perception that another person possesses valuable knowledge or competence French & Raven, 1959. Modern research on hierarchy adds an important qualification: expertise must be socially recognized. Knowledge that nobody can evaluate, notice, access, or connect to a current problem may create little practical influence.
Expertise therefore has at least three components. First, the competence must be real enough to produce useful outcomes. Second, it must be relevant to a task or uncertainty the group cares about. Third, other people must be able to infer, observe, or verify it. This is one reason expertise and prestige often become linked: demonstrated competence can generate respect, and respect increases the probability that a person's judgment will be sought.
The most comprehensive recent evidence on status attainment supports a more nuanced version of this competence route. Grosz, van Aert, and Back meta-analyzed 1,064 effects from 276 samples and found evidence consistent with competence and virtue routes, but also strong evidence that micropolitical behaviors matter: people can gain status partly by making competence or virtue more visible through assertive, extraverted, or socially adaptive behavior Grosz, van Aert, & Back, 2024. Their analysis also warns against treating social rank as proof of objective ability.
Expertise can become power through dependence. If a group has several equally capable specialists, no single specialist may control much. If one person alone understands a critical system, possesses rare institutional memory, or can interpret information that others cannot, the group's dependence on that person increases. This is Emerson's logic applied to knowledge: scarcity and lack of alternatives transform competence into bargaining power Emerson, 1962.
Expertise is also domain-specific. Being an expert in one area does not automatically create reliable judgment in another. Psychologically, however, status can spill over: once someone is recognized as highly competent, others may give their opinions more weight beyond the original domain. That is precisely why organizations benefit from distinguishing demonstrated expertise from generalized prestige.
Route 4: Networks — Access, Brokerage, Alliances, and Information
Power can arise from where a person sits in a network, not only from who they are. Social network research studies patterns of ties among people and asks how positions within those patterns affect access, information, coordination, opportunity, and influence. A modern review of organizational network research highlights brokerage, structural holes, tie characteristics, and relational patterns as central mechanisms through which network positions matter Brass, 2022.
One route is centrality: being connected to many relevant people or occupying a position through which important interactions pass. Classic organizational research found that employees' positions in workflow, communication, and friendship networks were strongly related to perceived influence and promotion, showing that influence was partly structural rather than simply personal Brass, 1984.
But centrality is not automatically power. Bonacich showed why this assumption can fail: in exchange networks, the power value of a connection depends on the alternatives available to the people around you, not merely on how many ties you have Bonacich, 1987. Ten redundant ties can provide less leverage than one connection that bridges otherwise disconnected groups.
Brokerage: power from connecting disconnected groups
Brokerage occurs when someone occupies a bridging position between people or groups that are not directly connected. Brokers can gain early access to diverse information, coordinate exchanges, translate between communities, introduce people who need one another, and sometimes control the timing or terms of interaction. Burt's influential study of structural holes found that managers whose networks spanned disconnected groups were disproportionately associated with valuable ideas, positive evaluations, compensation, and promotion Burt, 2004.
Later reviews emphasize that brokerage is not a single uniformly beneficial position. Its value depends on what a broker actually does, how trustworthy the broker is, whether others can bypass them, and whether the brokerage relationship creates coordination or exploitation. A comprehensive review by Kwon and colleagues describes brokerage as a dynamic combination of network structure, behavior, antecedents, outcomes, and moderators rather than a mechanical guarantee of advantage Kwon et al., 2020. Stovel and Shaw likewise note that brokerage can facilitate interaction and integration while also enabling exploitation and accumulation of power Stovel & Shaw, 2012.
Strong ties, weak ties, and the wrong idea that “more networking” always means more power
A network route to power is not simply a popularity contest. Dense trusted ties can provide cooperation, support, and reliable information. Bridging ties can expose someone to nonredundant information and multiple groups. The useful configuration depends on the task. Someone with many contacts who all know the same things may be well supported but poorly positioned to broker between domains. Someone who bridges groups may have informational advantages but weak trust if relationships are purely instrumental.
The practical implication is structural: network power grows when a person becomes useful to relationships that matter. Introducing collaborators, carrying information accurately across boundaries, coordinating resources, and maintaining trust can make others depend on one's network position. Hoarding information can also create dependence, but it often damages trust and encourages others to create bypasses.
Route 5: Status — Respect That Can Be Converted Into Influence
Status is social esteem: the respect, admiration, and voluntary deference a person receives from others. Anderson, Hildreth, and Howland's review defines status in these terms and distinguishes it from power, wealth, and belonging Anderson, Hildreth, & Howland, 2015. Status matters because respected people often receive attention, are consulted more frequently, are given greater latitude, and become plausible candidates for leadership or control over resources.
That means status can be converted into power, but the conversion is not guaranteed. A respected person may lack control over consequential resources. A person with formal power may receive little respect. Someone can be famous without being powerful in a particular organization, and someone can quietly control decisions without being widely admired.
How is status acquired? The evidence is broader than a simple dominance-versus-prestige story. The 2024 meta-analysis by Grosz and colleagues organized status attainment into dominance, competence, virtue, and micropolitics pathways and found the strongest overall pattern for micropolitical processes, with tentative support for competence and virtue and only partial support for dominance Grosz, van Aert, & Back, 2024. In other words, actual qualities matter, and so does whether people can see and interpret those qualities.
Moral behavior can also contribute to status. Bai's review developed a virtue route in which generosity and other valued moral behavior can evoke admiration and voluntary deference, while emphasizing that the virtues a community rewards depend on culture and local norms Bai, 2017. This matters for power acquisition because a reputation for fairness, reliability, or contribution can increase trust and make people more willing to delegate responsibility.
Formal Position and Authority: A Distinct Route to Resource Control
Organizations can create power directly by assigning roles. A position may include control over budgets, hiring, schedules, information, evaluation, access, sanctions, or strategic decisions. In such cases, the person's power comes partly from an institutional structure rather than from personal dominance, prestige, or expertise.
Formal position should still be separated from authority. Authority concerns the legitimacy of exercising power under a rule or recognized role. A supervisor may have authority to assign work because the organization recognizes that role; an informal expert can influence the same team without formal authority. The distinction is developed separately in Power vs Authority: Weber, Legitimacy, Influence, and Obedience.
Formal power is also rarely self-sufficient. A role can give someone the right to decide while leaving implementation dependent on employees, experts, clients, peers, or other units. Positional power therefore interacts with network and expertise power. A nominally senior person can be constrained by dependence on people who hold critical knowledge or relationships.
For a focused treatment of legitimate influence, expertise, trust, and obedience, see Authority in Psychology: Legitimacy, Expertise, Trust, and Obedience. For the distinction between autonomy-based and role-based power, see Personal Power vs Positional Power: Autonomy, Authority, Status, and Influence.
How the Routes Combine
Real hierarchies are usually hybrids. Expertise can produce prestige; prestige can produce status; status can increase access to central networks; network position can provide information and alliances; those resources can make someone a candidate for a formal role; a formal role can then increase control over rewards and decisions. The arrows can also run in reverse. A formal title may make a person's competence more visible, which raises status. High status can attract new network ties. A network broker can become an expert simply by seeing more varied information.
Dominance and prestige can also coexist in the same person. The dominance-prestige framework treats them as distinct strategies, not mutually exclusive personality types. Cheng and colleagues found them to be separate but viable pathways to social rank Cheng et al., 2013. A leader may be respected for expertise and simultaneously possess coercive resources. The psychological question is which mechanism is producing deference in a given moment.
Motives can be hybrid as well. Suessenbach and colleagues distinguished dominance motivation, prestige motivation, and leadership motivation. In their program of studies, dominance motivation was tied to wanting to coerce others, prestige motivation to admiration and respect, and leadership motivation to responsibility for the group; leadership motivation uniquely predicted higher employment rank in one study Suessenbach et al., 2019. These are motives, however, not guarantees of actual power. A person can strongly want influence while lacking the resources, recognition, or structural position required to obtain it.
What the Evidence Says About Who Rises
Popular accounts often search for a single “power personality”: dominant, charismatic, narcissistic, extraverted, strategic, or fearless. The evidence does not support collapsing power acquisition into one profile. The 2024 meta-analysis of status-related outcomes is especially useful here because it synthesized more than a century of research across personality, intelligence, physical size, respect, influence, popularity, and leadership emergence Grosz, van Aert, & Back, 2024.
The authors found that different traits relate to different status outcomes and that the pattern depends on the kind of rank being measured. Their broad conclusion favors a multi-route model. Competence matters. Virtue can matter. Assertive and extraverted behavior can make qualities more visible. Self-monitoring can help people adjust to social expectations. Dominance contributes to some outcomes but does not explain status attainment on its own.
This is also why the newest construct work matters. Körner and colleagues' 2025 systematic review showed that power, status, dominance, and prestige have often been measured with overlapping or mismatched instruments Körner, Overbeck, & Schütz, 2025. When studies define “power” as perceived dominance or define “status” as control, apparent contradictions can be artifacts of measurement. A scientifically serious account of how people gain power has to keep the target construct clear.
Visibility, Voice, and Competence Signaling
Having valuable qualities and receiving credit for them are separate problems. Groups cannot respond to expertise they do not recognize. This creates a role for voice, assertiveness, reputation, and self-presentation. Anderson and Kilduff's experiments showed that trait-dominant participants were judged as more competent and became more influential even when actual abilities were statistically controlled Anderson & Kilduff, 2009.
That result should not be turned into the popular simplification “confidence creates competence.” It shows that social inference is imperfect. People use behavioral cues when estimating who knows what. Assertiveness can make a contribution visible, but it can also create false positives. Over longer periods, repeated outcomes, peer verification, transparent performance measures, and exposure to real consequences can correct some signaling errors.
The 2024 meta-analysis makes a related point at much larger scale: status attainment was associated not only with qualities such as competence but with behaviors that enhance their apparent visibility Grosz, van Aert, & Back, 2024. This helps explain why technically excellent people can remain peripheral while less capable but more legible contributors rise. Social systems allocate rank using observable evidence, and observable evidence is never identical to underlying ability.
Why Context Changes Which Route Works
There is no context-free recipe for acquiring power. Groups differ in what they value, how replaceable members are, whether coercion is tolerated, how performance is evaluated, how easily people can exit, whether decision rights are centralized, and which network positions connect scarce resources.
A dominance strategy may generate rank where coercion is feasible and sanctions against aggressors are weak, but fail where peers can coordinate resistance or leave. Prestige may grow quickly in a group that can clearly observe expertise, but slowly where outcomes are noisy or specialized knowledge is difficult to evaluate. Brokerage is powerful when groups need coordination across boundaries, but less valuable if information is already transparent and anyone can make the same connections.
Empirical work supports this conditional view. De Waal-Andrews and colleagues found that behaviors associated with status acquisition changed with the group's hierarchy type de Waal-Andrews, Gregg, & Lammers, 2015. The 2024 meta-analysis also found mixed moderation by task, culture, acquaintance length, and type of status outcome, underscoring that rank is not produced by a universal trait-to-status formula Grosz, van Aert, & Back, 2024.
Gaining Power Is Different From Keeping It
Acquisition and maintenance are different psychological problems. A person can rise because they solve problems, coordinate a network, signal confidence, or receive formal authority. Keeping power requires the underlying dependency to continue. Expertise can become obsolete. Network contacts can bypass a broker. A coalition can fracture. A formal role can be removed. Prestige can decline when performance no longer justifies deference. Dominance can provoke counter-coalitions.
This distinction matters because some strategies work quickly but create conditions for their own erosion. Coercion can produce immediate compliance while motivating exit or resistance. Hoarding information can increase short-term dependence while encouraging others to document, redistribute, or automate that information. Prestige based on real contribution can be more resilient, but it also depends on continued recognition and relevance.
Cheng's review of dominance and prestige emphasizes this difference in stability: dominance rests on the ability to impose costs and is vulnerable to counter-dominance strategies, whereas prestige rests on valued abilities that others voluntarily seek Cheng, 2020. This is a difference in mechanism, not a moral ranking of every individual case.
What Does Not Automatically Equal Power?
Status
Status can increase influence, but respect is not the same as asymmetric control over resources. A celebrated person may have status without decision authority; an unpopular gatekeeper may have power without admiration Magee & Galinsky, 2008.
Dominance
Dominant behavior can be a route to rank, but a threatening style is not evidence that someone controls meaningful outcomes. Dominance works only when the threat is credible and alternatives or collective resistance are limited.
Expertise
Knowledge becomes power when it is relevant, recognized, and difficult to substitute. Expertise that does not affect valued decisions can remain respected but politically peripheral.
Popularity
Being liked can expand a person's network and willingness of others to cooperate, but liking is not identical to prestige, authority, or resource control. The 2024 status meta-analysis explicitly treats popularity, admiring respect, social influence, and leadership emergence as related but separable outcomes Grosz, van Aert, & Back, 2024.
A formal title
A title usually creates some role-based power, but actual influence depends on what decisions the role controls, whether people accept the role, and how dependent the officeholder is on expertise, allies, information, and implementation by others.
Personal control
Feeling autonomous and able to direct one's own life is psychologically valuable, but it is different from having power over other people's outcomes. Someone can have substantial autonomy and little social power, or substantial social power and limited autonomy because they are constrained by institutions, shareholders, voters, boards, laws, or professional dependencies.
Practical Implications: How Power Is Built Without Reducing It to Domination
The evidence suggests a practical sequence that is less glamorous than popular “power tactics” but more consistent with how durable influence emerges. Build something other people genuinely value. Make that contribution legible. Become reliable in a domain where outcomes matter. Develop relationships across relevant groups. Increase your alternatives rather than making yourself dependent on a single gatekeeper. Help other people coordinate. Protect trust because network access and prestige both depend on it. Learn which decisions actually control resources instead of confusing visible rank with consequential power.
Expertise is strongest when it solves consequential problems and is difficult to replace. Prestige grows when others can observe value and voluntarily seek a person's judgment. Networks become influential when they connect people, information, and resources that otherwise remain separated. Status can amplify all of these by increasing attention and deference. Formal position adds institutional control. Dominance can produce compliance when costs and constraints make resistance difficult, but it is only one route and often creates incentives for people to seek alternatives.
This framework also changes how organizations should think about power. If influence is partly produced by dependence, visibility, and network position, then formal organizational charts reveal only part of the hierarchy. A useful power analysis asks who controls scarce resources, who possesses non-substitutable expertise, who is trusted, who connects groups, whose approval changes outcomes, and who has credible alternatives.
The same framework explains why ethical questions cannot be answered simply by asking whether someone has power. A prestigious physician, a coercive supervisor, a network broker, a charismatic founder, and a committee chair may all influence others, but their power rests on different psychological and structural mechanisms. Those mechanisms determine how influence can be challenged, shared, legitimized, or lost.
Evidence Status and Limits
Several parts of this account rest on well-established theoretical traditions and substantial empirical literatures: power-dependence theory, the distinction between power and status, social network models of brokerage and centrality, and the dominance-prestige literature. The 2024 meta-analysis and 2025 systematic review strengthen the contemporary evidence base by showing both the multi-route nature of status attainment and the persistent measurement problems surrounding hierarchy concepts.
At the same time, not every finding generalizes equally across cultures, institutions, age groups, or relationship types. Much of the experimental literature uses small groups, university samples, workplace settings, or specific organizational tasks. Network effects depend heavily on the structure being studied. Measures of “influence,” “status,” “dominance,” and “power” have sometimes overlapped, which can inflate apparent consistency across different constructs Körner, Overbeck, & Schütz, 2025.
Causal claims should therefore remain mechanism-specific. It is reasonable to say that scarce expertise can create dependence, that brokerage can create informational and coordination advantages, and that dominance and prestige are empirically distinguishable routes to social rank. It is much less defensible to say that any single trait inevitably makes a person powerful, or that one route works in every hierarchy.
Questions People Ask
What is the fastest way people gain power?
There is no universally fastest route. Formal appointment can create immediate positional power; dominance can produce rapid compliance when threats are credible; expertise can create power quickly during a high-stakes problem; and network brokerage can become powerful when coordination suddenly becomes essential. Which route is fastest depends on what other people need and what alternatives they have.
Is dominance the same as power?
No. Dominance is a strategy or hierarchy route based on threat, force, intimidation, or cost imposition. Power is the capacity to affect valued outcomes. Dominance can create power, but power can also arise from expertise, networks, formal roles, rewards, prestige, or other resources.
What is the difference between prestige and status?
Prestige is commonly treated as a route or form of voluntarily granted rank based on valued qualities such as skill or knowledge. Status is the broader standing of respect, admiration, and deference a person receives. In practice the constructs overlap, which is one reason recent reviews call for more careful measurement Körner, Overbeck, & Schütz, 2025.
Does expertise automatically give someone power?
No. Expertise creates power when it is relevant to valued outcomes, recognized by others, and not easily replaced. A highly skilled person may have little influence if the group does not need that skill or cannot evaluate it.
Why do networks create power?
Networks can create power by providing access to information, alternatives, allies, resources, and coordination opportunities. Brokerage can be especially consequential when someone connects otherwise disconnected groups. But centrality alone is not a guarantee of power; the value of a network position depends on the alternatives and dependencies embedded in the network Bonacich, 1987.
Can someone have status without power?
Yes. A person can be respected and admired without controlling resources or decisions. Status often increases influence, but it is analytically distinct from power Anderson, Hildreth, & Howland, 2015.
Can someone have power without status?
Yes. A gatekeeper, bureaucratic officeholder, owner, supervisor, or controller of a scarce resource can have substantial power even if others do not admire or respect them. Power concerns dependence and outcome control; status concerns esteem.
Do confident people become powerful because confidence signals competence?
Confidence and assertiveness can affect perceived competence and influence, but they are imperfect signals. Anderson and Kilduff found that dominant individuals could be perceived as more competent even after actual ability was controlled Anderson & Kilduff, 2009. The evidence therefore supports a signaling effect, not the claim that confidence is competence.
Is power mostly taken or given?
Both mechanisms exist. Coercion can impose compliance, formal institutions can assign decision rights, and scarce resource control can create dependence. Prestige and status, however, depend substantially on other people's voluntary deference. Network power also depends on relationships that others maintain. A complete psychology of power therefore includes both constraint and social conferral.
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