Status in Teams
People have a fundamental desire to be respected by their peers.
What strategies do people use to attain respect and status within teams, and how does that behavior impact the way the team operates and performs?
Relevant Publications
Collective attention and collective intelligence: The role of hierarchy and team gender composition
Organization Science, 2022, with A. W. Woolley, A. Mayo, C. Riedl, and J. W. Chang
Collective intelligence (CI) captures a team’s ability to work together across a wide range of tasks and can vary significantly between teams. Extant work demonstrates that the level of collective attention a team develops has an important influence on their level of CI. An important question, then, is what enhances collective attention? Prior work demonstrates an association with team composition; here we additionally examine the influence of team hierarchy and its interaction with team gender composition. To do so, we conducted an experiment with 584 individuals working in 146 teams in which we randomly assigned each team to work in a stable, unstable, or unspecified hierarchical team structure and varied team gender composition. We examined how team structure led to different behavioral manifestations of collective attention as evidenced in team speaking patterns. We find that a stable hierarchical structure increases more cooperative, synchronous speaking patterns, but that unstable hierarchical structure and a lack of specified hierarchical structure both increase competitive, interruptive speaking patterns. Moreover, the effect of cooperative vs. competitive speaking patterns on collective intelligence is moderated by the teams’ gender composition; majority female teams exhibit higher CI when their speaking patterns are more cooperative and synchronous, whereas all male teams exhibit higher CI when their speaking involves more competitive interruptions. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for enhancing collective intelligence in organizational teams.
Unpacking participation and influence: Diversity's countervailing effects on expertise use in groups.
Academy of Management Discoveries, 2020, with A. T. Mayo and A. W. Woolley
Although organizations frequently use groups to solve complex problems, groups often fail to use all available expertise, thus generating suboptimal solutions. To better understand why this occurs, we distinguish between two processes that are related to expertise use, but often empirically conflated: participation and influence. Using detailed process data from a laboratory study of 544 individuals working in 136 four-person groups, we find group members with relatively more expertise tend to participate more and have more influence. However, we find dissimilarity from the rest of the group (in terms of sex) disrupts the relationship between individual expertise and participation. Simultaneously, conditional on participation, the same dissimilarity strengthens the relationship between expertise and influence. These patterns aggregate such that group diversity (again, in terms of sex) affects group performance in opposing ways – detracting from the alignment between group member expertise and participation, but enhancing the alignment between group member expertise and influence, resulting in an overall null effect of group diversity on group performance. We also explore the effects of race diversity on participation and influence. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for research on diversity and intragroup processes.
The effects of inter-group status on the pursuit of intra-group status.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2017, with J. Chang and A. W. Woolley
This research examines how the status of one’s group influences intra-group behavior and collective outcomes. Two experiments provide evidence that, compared to members of low-status groups, members of high-status groups are more concerned about their intra-group standing, which in turn can increase both the likelihood of competitive and cooperative intra-group behavior. However, whether the desire for intra-group standing manifests via competitive versus cooperative behavior depends on the relevance of the task to the group’s inter-group standing. When the task is not relevant to the group’s status, members of high-status groups are more likely to engage in competitive behavior out of a desire to manage their intra-group status, which, in turn, leads to less desirable collective outcomes. However, when the group’s status is at stake, members of high-status groups seek intra-group status via cooperative behavior, leading to better collective outcomes.
A desire for extremity: The influence of leader normativeness and inter-group competition on group member support.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2015, with J. Chang and N. Turan
Group members typically prefer leaders who have characteristics or attitudes that are in line with group norms (i.e., are normative). In this paper, we explore the possibility that in highly competitive inter-group contexts, group members prefer leaders who can more effectively differentiate the in-group from out-groups, leading to a preference for leaders with more extreme attitudes that are in line with group norms (i.e., pro-normative). In three experiments conducted in an election context in the United States, we find that both Democrats’ and Republicans’ preference for an extreme leader increases under conditions of high inter-group competition. Results indicate that participants’ heightened need to differentiate their political party from the competing party drives this effect, and that this effect is stronger for those who identify strongly with their political party. Implications for group members’ responses to in-group deviance and leadership support are discussed.
Excluded emotions: The role of anger in responses to social ostracism.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2008, with L. Z. Tiedens and C. Govan
In this article, we examined the role of anger in the link between social exclusion and antisocial behavior. We compared the effects of anger to another negative emotion, sadness. In Study 1, social exclusion was associated with feelings of anger, and anger was associated with antisocial behavior. In contrast, sadness was not associated with antisocial behavior. In Study 2, feelings of anger were manipulated by excluding participants for either a fair or unfair reason. Unfairly excluded participants were more angry and were more likely to engage in antisocial behavior than fairly excluded participants. Implications for the study of emotions in the context of social exclusion are discussed.