Week 4 – Sources of Power and it’s Impact in Company Culture

My time at my internship site has really solidified two theories and their relationship. These concepts are sources of power and group culture. Throughout the summer Dr. Helms spoke about how lucky she was to have a group that was as motivated and outgoing that we are. Through talking with her, I was told there have been summers where people were not as engaged or motivated (will speak about potentials to remedy this later) and thought it was great to have us as a batch of students. Thinking about our lab group, I think our success in this environment stemmed from a lab culture that the other students and I unknowingly formed. I joined the lab the same day as two other members, and we all simultaneously met a third member who was experienced working with Dr. Helms. This automatically gave her a source of power, referent power, as she knew most of the things we would learn over the course of the next couple days. She set the tone for the group, with her project being the creation of her own device to be work in tandem with a project. She was very hands-on and was willing to teach the other students how to use different equipment, even the ones we weren’t using in our own project. Through her intervention, as a group we became slightly obsessed with the DIY-nature of the lab, correcting things and improving whenever we could. Every member also made something over the course of the summer (two members made gifts for significant others, one member made small wooden sculptures, and I picked up painting). We would update each other on the progress of our individual projects, many times bringing them in and asking each other opinions for progression. This definitely bled over into our research work, we took that approach when dealing with novel problems that arose. Unknowingly, the student that had expert power yet no legitimate power was able to influence the culture of our lab group for the better.