The strength, , of dislocation is dependent on the shear modulus, G, the magnitude of the Burgers vector, b, and the dislocation density, :
where  is the intrinsic strength of the material with low dislocation density and  is a correction factor specific to the material.
As shown in Figure 1 and the equation above, work hardening has a half root dependency on the number of dislocations. The material exhibits high strength if there are either high levels of dislocations (greater than 10 dislocations per m) or no dislocations. A moderate number of dislocations (between 10 and 10 dislocations per m) typically results in low strength.