Abstract
Ever feel concerned that you may not achieve your career goals or feel worried about where your life is going? Such examples may reflect the experience of status anxiety, that is, concerns that one may be stuck or not able to move up in life, or worries that one may be too low in standing compared to society’s standards. Status anxiety is believed to be exacerbated by economic inequality and negatively affect well-being. While job satisfaction is an important determinant of well-being, no research has examined whether status anxiety can also help explain people’s satisfaction with their jobs. We tested whether status anxiety differs from other organizational constructs and uniquely relates to job satisfaction among full-time working adults. In a pilot study, we found that status anxiety is separate from the concept of job insecurity (e.g., perceived threat of job loss). Results of our main study also indicated that higher status anxiety significantly predicted lower job satisfaction beyond several other indicators of organizational attitudes (job insecurity, occupational self-efficacy, distributive, procedural, and interactional justice), as well as the tendency to seek status and several background factors (e.g., income, education, perceived socioeconomic status). We discuss the unique role of status anxiety in job satisfaction and the implications of this research to our understanding of status concerns, as well as organizational attitudes and policies.
Highlights
Many people aspire to advance their position in society
We examine our hypothesis by including several background characteristics, some of which have been found to relate to status anxiety (e.g., age, income, perceived socioeconomic status (SES); Day and Fiske, manuscript in preparation), job satisfaction, or other indicators of well-being
Testing our main hypothesis in the study may provide additional evidence of the uniqueness of these constructs. While both job insecurity measures reasonably fit the two-factor models above and appear to be viable indicators of job insecurity, we selected the Borg and Elizur measure to use in our main study, where we examine whether status anxiety will uniquely predict job satisfaction
Summary
Many people aspire to advance their position in society. There are a variety of advantages to having higher status, including greater influence and perceived competence, as well as higher quality of life and well-being (Marmot, 2003; Conger and Donnellan, 2007; Li et al, 2016; Oh et al, 2020). The desire and prospect of higher socioeconomic status can motivate many important outcomes, such as educational and career achievement (Haller and Portes, 1973; Zukin and Maguire, 2004; Shane et al, 2012; Gerbasi and Prentice, 2013; Shane and Heckhausen, 2016; Browman et al, 2017; Elliot and Hulleman, 2017). There is almost always a higher status that can be attained, and the vast majority never reach the very top. As first broadly conceptualized by de Botton (2004), status anxiety involves concerns that one does not fulfill society’s definition of success. It can be reflected in worries about not moving up, being
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