The concept of power is defined and used differently in different disciplines (Follett, 1940; Foucault, 1986; Galbraith, 1983; Wrong, 1995).

A highly influential concept in social psychology was developed by French and Raven (1959; Raven, 1965, 1992, 1993). Their bases of social power, i.e., coercive, reward, legitimate, expert, referent and information power, were often tested for relations within and between organisations (Aguinis, Simonsen, & Pierce, 1998; Elangovan & Xie, 1999, 2000; Goodman & Dion, 2001; Leonidou, Talias, & Leonidou, 2008; Raven, 1992; Raven, Schwarzwald, & Koslowsky, 1998; Teven & Herring, 2005). Raven and colleagues (1998) merge the six forms of power into harsh and soft power forms.

Taking into account the terminology of research on regulation (Turner, 2005; Tyler, 2006), in the project we term harsh power coercive power and soft power legitimate power.