Power, authority, and responsibility are important concepts related to leadership. A leader’s power is the means of influencing others. Authority is the right to influence others through one's position in an organization. Responsibility is the duty that should be accomplished by a leader. There are many ways to classify the sources of power for a leader. One way is to classify the sources of power into the following two broad categories:      

Positional Power 

Positional power comes from a leader's formal position in society or an organizational hierarchy. For example, the positions of President, Prime Minister, Governor, Chief Executive Officer, and General Manager, etc. Every one of these positions has some power attached to it. 

A person holding a certain formal position in an organization will enjoy the power attached to that position. It is the legitimate power of a leader that comes by virtue of his or her formal position. The leader is elected or appointed to hold a formal leadership position. Each such position provides some reward or punishment power to a leader. By virtue of reward power, a leader can give away items of value, tangible or intangible, to others. By virtue of punishment power, a leader can take away items of value, tangible or intangible, from others.

Personal Power

The second source of power for a leader is his personal power, which comes from a leader's personal attributes like the leader’s charisma, expertise, achievements, efforts, integrity, dependability, and self-confidence. The presence of such attributes in a leader enhances the leader’s power to influence others. 

For example, it is commonly said, "Knowledge is power". This implies that a knowledgeable person in an important relevant area will influence others more than a person who does not have good knowledge in that area. In the same way, a highly confident person will influence others more than a person who lacks confidence.

In a nutshell, we can say that some sources of a leader's power come from his or her formal position in the society or organization, like the reward power and the punishment power. And some power comes from his or her personal characteristics like communication skills, charisma, persuasion skills, motivating skills, expertise, achievements, efforts, integrity, dependability, and self-confidence. Figure 1 shows the relationships between positional factors and personal factors of power for a leader and the influencing process:

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