Hierarchies and Voluntary Third-Party Intervention: The Case of Authorship Conflicts in Biology Labs

Abstract

Third parties play a vital role in resolving a wide range of conflicts effectively and peacefully. However, little is known about when or why mere observers of conflicts take on the role of a third party intervener. Integrating research on the approach theory of power, and the functional perspective of hierarchies, we conducted three studies to investigate how role-based power influences third parties’ propensity to voluntarily intervene in others’ conflicts. Consistent with our expectations, in our main field study, we found that biology lab researchers who held high- power roles relative to the disputants, were more likely to intervene authorship conflicts compared to researchers who held low-power roles compared to disputants. In Studies 2 and 3, we expanded our investigation to organizational conflicts outside of research labs, and again found that upward voluntary intervention was more prevalent than downward voluntary intervention. We further found that this effect was in part mediated by the third parties’ heightened approach tendencies (Study 3).