Authority, Power, and Legitimacy

Every organization runs on power, but not every organization can explain why some people may use that power and others may not. Governance tries to answer that question. To do it well, you need a clear view of three related but distinct ideas: power, authority, and legitimacy.

This piece introduces those concepts and shows how they interact. Later articles will look at process and failure modes in more detail. Here, the aim is simpler: to give you language for what you already see every day.

Why Distinguish Power, Authority, and Legitimacy?

In ordinary conversation, people often use these words as if they meant the same thing. In practice, they describe different layers of the same phenomenon.

• Power is the practical ability to make things happen.
• Authority is power attached to a recognized role.
• Legitimacy is the shared belief that a role has the right to exercise that power.

Governance work often fails when these are blurred. You are unlikely to fix a legitimacy problem with more force. You generally cannot fix a power problem by drawing a new org chart. And you should not assume that because a role exists on paper, people will treat its decisions as binding.

Power: The Ability to Make Things Happen

Power is the capacity to cause outcomes. It can come from money, information, relationships, formal position, control of systems, or physical force. It is about what someone can do in practice, not what they should do or are allowed to do.

Power can exist with or without formal status. A long-tenured assistant who controls the calendar of a key executive has real power. So does a senior engineer who understands the only production system well enough to change it safely.

By itself, the concept of power is amoral. It describes capability, not ethics. People feel power most acutely when it is used against them or without explanation.

Authority: Power Attached to a Role

Authority is power that has been tied to an office or role rather than to a person alone. An individual does not simply act; they act in their capacity as a director, officer, committee chair, or manager.

Authority should be bounded. It has scope (what decisions), conditions (under what circumstances), and limits (how far it extends before additional approval is needed). A chief executive may sign contracts up to a certain value. Beyond that, the board must approve. A committee may set policy, but not spend beyond its budget.

On paper, authority is defined in charters, bylaws, job descriptions, and policies. In practice, organizations often tolerate large gaps between these documents and how decisions are actually made. When informal influence overrides formal authority too often, people stop taking the structure seriously.

Legitimacy: The Belief That Authority is Rightful

Legitimacy is the belief, shared by those affected, that a person or body has the right to exercise authority—and that others ought to comply even when they disagree with a particular decision.

Legitimacy is relational. It does not live in the job title. It lives in the minds of staff, members, shareholders, regulators, counterparties, and the public. They decide, collectively, whether a role is worth respecting.

Legitimacy comes from process, consent, and track record. People are more willing to accept difficult decisions when they can see that:

• the decision-maker was properly chosen or appointed,
• the decision was reached through a known procedure, and
• past use of that authority has been reasonably fair and competent.

When legitimacy is weak, compliance becomes contingent and political. People will obey when it is convenient, or when they fear the consequences of disobedience, but they will not always internalize the decision as binding.

When Power, Authority, and Legitimacy Align

The ideal case is simple to describe and hard to maintain: the people who have practical power are the same people the structure authorizes to decide, and their decisions are broadly accepted as rightful.

In that state:

• Power mostly sits where the work and accountability sit.
• Authority is clear on paper, and day-to-day decisions follow it in practice.
• Legitimacy is strong enough that people will accept unpopular outcomes as part of a fair process, not as arbitrary impositions.

You still see disagreement and disappointment, but you see little confusion about who decides or whether their decisions count. Compliance feels like cooperation rather than submission.

No organization lives in this alignment all the time. People change roles, crises appear, and new coalitions form. The point of governance is not to freeze the system in a perfect state, but to make it easier to notice when power, authority, and legitimacy start to pull apart—and to correct that drift before it becomes normal.

Patterns: When the Mix Goes Wrong

Power, authority, and legitimacy rarely line up perfectly. When they pull apart, the same ingredients show up in familiar failure patterns:

| Power | Authority | Legitimacy | Labels | Description | |-------|-----------|------------|---------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------| | ✔︎ | ✘ | ✘ | Shadow strongman | Informal boss dominates without role or consent; fear, workarounds, exit. | | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | ✘ | Paper tyrant | Titled leader uses full powers but has no real buy-in from those affected. | | ✔︎ | ✘ | ✔︎ | Shadow executive | Trusted actor displaces formal roles; structure becomes hollow decoration. | | ✘ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | Underpowered board | Respected authority with no levers; direction agreed but not implemented. | | ✘ | ✔︎ | ✘ | Rubber-stamp body | Authority on paper that everyone bypasses in practice. | | ✘ | ✘ | ✔︎ | Toothless conscience| Trusted voice with no path to action; slow disillusionment and drift. |

These are not static boxes. A single meeting, decision, or scandal can move an organization from one pattern to another.

How Quickly These States Can Shift

It is tempting to talk about power, authority, and legitimacy as if they were fixed traits. In practice, they can be fragile and fluctuate—sometimes in hours.

Legitimacy is especially volatile around unpopular decisions or stressful events. A board may have clear authority and real power, and may even act with care, yet a single decision can sharply reduce how “rightful” its authority feels to those affected. The same decision may strengthen legitimacy with one group and weaken it with another.

This volatility helps explain why "less-than-good" governance measures appear in the real world. When leaders believe they are acting justly, or urgently, they will often lean on whatever mix of power, authority, and perceived legitimacy they have available. From the outside, we naturally frown on these patterns. From the inside, they can feel necessary or even virtuous.

That does not make every use acceptable. But it does mean that to understand governance as it is actually practiced, we have to look at how people move through these states under pressure, not only at the ideal diagrams.

Transitional Patterns: Using an Imperfect Mix to Repair the System

The same combinations that look unhealthy in the long run can sometimes be used, briefly and explicitly, to restore healthier alignment. The difference is intent, transparency, and whether the pattern is treated as transitional rather than normal:

| Power | Authority | Legitimacy | Labels | Description | |-------|-----------|------------|---------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | ✔︎ | ✘ | ✘ | Emergency override | Short, explicit exception in a crisis, followed by review and formal ratification. | | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | ✘ | Stabilizing force | Firm enforcement of clear rules while a new group or process earns trust. | | ✔︎ | ✘ | ✔︎ | Trusted fixer | Informal leader unblocks issues while formal roles and rules are repaired. | | ✘ | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | Design authority | Board or committee designs structure while execution capacity catches up. | | ✘ | ✔︎ | ✘ | Interim oversight | Temporary role created to architect or audit process, on a clear mandate. | | ✘ | ✘ | ✔︎ | Early warning voice | Moral or technical voice surfaces problems for the system to absorb. |

The aim of governance is not to avoid every imperfect configuration. It is to prevent unhealthy patterns from hardening into habit, and to use transitional patterns sparingly and consciously to move back toward a state where power, authority, and legitimacy mostly point in the same direction.