The Hidden Toll of Getting Ahead

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

Frontiers of Hierarchy Research: Status, Power, and Inequality

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

Hierarchy is an essential component of social life, which emerges spontaneously and organize the social dynamics (Durkheim, 1960; Magee & Galinsky, 2008). Two of the most widely studied and fundamental hierarchical dimensions are status and power (Blader & Chen, 2012; Fiske, 2010; Kemper, 2006; Weber, 1964). Status is defined as the prestige, respect, and esteem that an individual or a group has in the eyes of others (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Magee & Galinsky, 2008) and power is defined as individuals’ asymmetric control over valuable resources (Blau, 1964; Greer et al., 2017; Magee & Galinsky, 2008). Previous studies on status and power have shown their impacts on a variety of important outcomes, such as social resources (Lin, 1999), emotions (Kemper, 2006), learning (Bunderson & Reagans, 2011), and goal seeking (Guinote, 2017). This symposium aims to contribute to continuing the discussion of social hierarchy in impacting social life with novel perspectives on both traditional concepts such as gender differences and competition/cooperation, and understudied yet important phenomena such as individual exploration and discrimination recognition. We believe that our symposium will help generate new perspectives and important questions regarding social hierarchy and its relationships with various constructs. We hope that it will facilitate sophisticated theorizing and rigorous empirical research in this line of research.

Secrets at work

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2024-07-01 · 20 citations

Are many sex/gender differences really power differences?

PNAS Nexus · 2024-02-01 · 16 citations

Abstract This research addresses the long-standing debate about the determinants of sex/gender differences. Evolutionary theorists trace many sex/gender differences back to natural selection and sex-specific adaptations. Sociocultural and biosocial theorists, in contrast, emphasize how societal roles and social power contribute to sex/gender differences beyond any biological distinctions. By connecting two empirical advances over the past two decades—6-fold increases in sex/gender difference meta-analyses and in experiments conducted on the psychological effects of power—the current research offers a novel empirical examination of whether power differences play an explanatory role in sex/gender differences. Our analyses assessed whether experimental manipulations of power and sex/gender differences produce similar psychological and behavioral effects. We first identified 59 findings from published experiments on power. We then conducted a P-curve of the experimental power literature and established that it contained evidential value. We next subsumed these effects of power into 11 broad categories and compared them to 102 similar meta-analytic sex/gender differences. We found that high-power individuals and men generally display higher agency, lower communion, more positive self-evaluations, and similar cognitive processes. Overall, 71% (72/102) of the sex/gender differences were consistent with the effects of experimental power differences, whereas only 8% (8/102) were opposite, representing a 9:1 ratio of consistent-to-inconsistent effects. We also tested for discriminant validity by analyzing whether power corresponds more strongly to sex/gender differences than extraversion: although extraversion correlates with power, it has different relationships with sex/gender differences. These results offer novel evidence that many sex/gender differences may be explained, in part, by power differences.

Local and Global Status Concerns Independently Predict Jargon use Among Psychologists

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24 · 1 citations

When do academicians utilize circumlocutions and sesquipedalian pleonasms to elucidate discoveries and promulgate pedagogical proclamations? That is, when do scientists use jargon to describe their research? We argue that a speaker’s social goals, above and beyond their communicative ones, influence their language use. The current research explores the use of one form of language—jargon—to symbolically signal a speaker’s social standing. Existing theories in sociology, economics, and linguistics, which suggest that higher-status and embedded individuals within professional networks use more jargon than lower-status and newer members. In contrast, we propose that low status, both global (e.g., organizational status within an industry) and local (e.g., individual status within a team), increase jargon use in the hopes of securing higher status from audiences. To test our hypotheses, we constructed a novel dataset using seven years of academic poster titles presented at the largest annual personality and social psychology conference (N = 8,239). As public presentations, posters represent a highly evaluative context where people hope to secure respect from an audience. Analyses revealed that both global and local status concerns independently predicted jargon use in poster titles. For global status, the status of the authors’ universities predicted jargon use; authors from lower-status schools included more jargon in their poster titles. For local status, first authors with a co-author from a higher-status university included more jargon in their titles. These results suggest that individuals use jargon to secure status, regardless of whether the source of their status concerns are global or local.

Confronters Can Cause Harm by Soliciting Marginalized Employees’ Voice When Confronting Prejudice

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24 · 1 citations

When confronting acts of prejudice in the workplace, advantaged group confronters may solicit input—or voice—from employees who belong to disadvantaged groups, thereby involving them (potentially against their will) in the confrontation. Across three pre-registered studies (N=1448) —using multiple prejudice confrontation and voice solicitation situations and different disadvantaged groups (i.e., women and racially marginalized individuals)—we find that doing so has negative affective consequences for the disadvantaged group member and negative evaluative consequences for the ally. Specifically, members of disadvantaged groups whose voices are directly solicited by an ally during a prejudice confrontation experience greater emotional burden; in turn, they view the ally as less deserving of status and seek to minimize their future exposure to the ally. We also demonstrate that this effect is contingent on two factors: whether the perpetrator of prejudice is present (or absent) when the confronter solicits voice, and how directly they solicit voice from the disadvantaged group member. Together, our findings highlight the theoretical value and practical importance of examining prejudice confrontations from the disadvantaged group member’s perspective.

Frontiers of Hierarchy Research: The Impacts of Low Power and Changing Power

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022-07-06

Power, defined as individuals’ asymmetric control over valuable resources, is a central reality of organizational life. Decades of power research have offered us plenty of insights into how the powerful think, feel, and behave. However, researchers contend that this emphasis on high power may have resulted in an insufficient understanding of low-power individuals, and that taking a static view of power may have hampered the development of the literature. To help move the literature forward, our symposium contains two papers that focus explicitly on the effects of low power, one paper that investigates the causes of increasing power, and one paper that examines the effects of power fluctuations. Taken together, these papers extend our understanding and generate new research directions for how the power literature can move forward. How do Low-Power Individuals Compete? An Investigation of Covert Competition Presenter: Yufei Zhong; Georgia Institute of Technology Presenter: Huisi Li; Georgia Institute of Technology The Power to Leverage Your Power: How Social Power Affects the Use of Negotiation-Specific Power Presenter: Alice J. Lee; Columbia Business School Presenter: Nicholas Hays; Michigan State U. Presenter: Huisi Li; Georgia Institute of Technology Presenter: Adam Galinsky; Columbia Business School The Distortionary Power of Naysaying: Naysaying and Negativity Inflate Decision Makers’ Confidence Presenter: Jieun Pai; U. of Virginia Presenter: Eileen Chou; U. of Virginia The Energizing Effect of Daily Power Fluctuations Presenter: Hae-Lyeng Rose Kim; Robert H. Smith School of Business, U. of Maryland Presenter: Trevor Foulk; Robert H. Smith School of Business, U. of Maryland Presenter: Michael Schaerer; Singapore Management U. Presenter: Jake Gale; U. of Florida Presenter: Eric Anicich; U. of Southern California

Flexing and floundering in the on-demand economy: Narrative identity construction under algorithmic management

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2022-02-23 · 48 citations

The Manager in Intragroup and Intergroup Hierarchies: Managing Hierarchy Across Levels of Analysis

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2021-07-26

Research on hierarchy within organizations tends to focus on hierarchies of individuals within a group (intragroup hierarchy) or on hierarchies composed of groups, such a race- and gender-based hierarchies (intergroup hierarchy). Although both types of hierarchies impact individuals in organizations, the literatures on intra- and intergroup hierarchy run largely separately without significant cross-fertilization. This is likely to the detriment of both literatures: many ideas fundamental to hierarchy at one level of analysis are virtually or totally underexplored on the other level of analysis, undoubtedly leading to problematic gaps in our theorizing. This panel symposium will engage a group of expert panelists in a formal, moderated discussion of how intra- and intergroup hierarchy research can be integrated. We expect that more integrative theorizing will be a boon to the literature on hierarchy and that it will bolster organizational researchers’ ability to provide actionable recommendations to frontline managers around the globe.