Status Conflict Research Articles

The Positive Effects of Status Conflicts in Teams Where Members Perceive Status Hierarchies Differently

Status conflicts, conflicts about members’ relative positions in a team’s status hierarchy, generally harm group performance. We integrate research on status conflicts and social information processing and find in two longitudinal survey studies that the disruptive effects of status conflicts depend on the extent to which members agree about the group’s status hierarchy. Specifically, status conflicts in teams with high-status agreement disrupt team performance by producing lower status agreement after the conflict. Status conflicts that occur in teams with low-status agreement, however, benefit performance by helping members clarify the hierarchy, leading to higher subsequent status agreement. In a third study, we examine how status conflict and status agreement interactively impact teams’ use of task-relevant cues to assign status. By contextualizing status conflicts in terms of the teams’ status agreement, we identify conditions in which the dysfunctional effects of status conflicts counterintuitively enhance team performance.

Hierarchy and Its Discontents: Status Disagreement Leads to Withdrawal of Contribution and Lower Group Performance

Research on status and group productivity has highlighted that status hierarchies tend to emerge quickly and encourage contributions to group efforts by rewarding contributors with enhanced status. This and other status research has tended to assume that status hierarchies are agreed-upon among group members. Here, we build on recent work on status conflict in investigating the prevalence and consequences of situations in which group members hold differing perceptions of the status ordering—that is, of who ranks where—which we call status disagreement. Across two studies of interacting groups, we examined several different types of status disagreement and found that disagreements in which two group members both viewed themselves as higher in status than the other, or upward disagreements, were uniquely harmful for groups. These types of disagreements led the involved members to reduce their contributions to the group, substantially decreasing group performance. However, other forms of dyadic status disagreements, as well as overall levels of status consensus, did not significantly affect group functioning. Furthermore, we found that individuals higher in personality dominance were those most likely to be involved in these harmful upward disagreements. These findings demonstrate the importance of more thoroughly considering status disagreement as a dimension that can vary in quantity and type across groups. In doing so, they contribute to understanding of status dynamics and group performance and suggest important implications for teams within organizations.

Role Change and Interaction Dynamics in Hierarchical Groups: A Field Experiment in Healthcare

Relational inertia arising from formal roles and status hierarchies is endemic and problematic in many organizations. This study examines how role-power expansion for those in the middle of hierarchical groups, a central but understudied population, affects network structure and the nature of interactions within these groups. To do so, we conducted a field experiment assessing the effect of a formal role expansion for nurses involved in primary care delivery on interactions within hierarchical care groups. We utilized wearable social sensors to collect second-by-second data on face-to-face interactions, conversational characteristics, and body movements which allowed us to study who interacted with who in workgroups, as well as how interactions occurred. We find that role-power expansion in hierarchical contexts can produce the desired effect of overcoming relational inertia. However, it can also generate status conflict, which ignites competitive rather than collaborative behavior. Our study contributes to research on the interplay of formal and informal organization and network dynamics by documenting a key mechanism by which relational inertia can be overcome and analyzing the complexity in social interactions that can arise when this change occurs in hierarchical workgroups.

Leadership Empowerment Behavior to Creativity:Perceived Status and Feedback Seeking Climate

Through the lens of relational fairness theory, we argued that leadership empowerment behavior promotes employee creativity and team creativity through enhancing employees’ self-perceived status and feedback-seeking climate of a team. Using a sample of 84 teams with 392 employees from 8 companies and two waves of data collection, we found that feedback-seeking climate mediated the relationship between leadership empowerment behavior and employees’ creativity. Besides, leadership empowerment behavior was found positively related to employee self-perceived status while employee self-perceived status promoted employee creativity. The buffering effect of status conflict as a moderator in the meditational chain from leadership empowerment behavior to feedback-seeking climate was identified. We also found a cross-level relationship between feedback-seeking climate and employee’s self-perceived status. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

Conflict Management Styles of Female Androgynous Supervisor and Subordinate

The recent trends and challenges have brought dramatic changes in terms of creating virtual workplaces for both men and women. The present study aims to investigate feminine androgynous supervisors and subordinates who belong to rural and urban area and their differences in conflict management styles in work setting, research was conducted on the differences between status, residential area and preferred conflict management strategies. Identify the differences between androgynous female supervisor and subordinates and their adopted to resolve interpersonal conflict. The sample consisted of 220 Organizational androgynous female employees selected randomly from various branches of Rajkot districts. The Bem‟s Sex Role Orientation (BSRO) inventory adapted in Indian setting by Rao, Gupta and Murthy was used to measure gender role. Rahim‟s Organization Conflict Inventory (ROCI-II) was used to measure Conflict management style. The study reflects that significant effect between supervisor and subordinates conflict management styles and there was significant interactional effect of status and residential area.

Status conflicts between Russia and the West: Perceptions and emotional biases

This article looks at the status conflicts between Russia and the West and asks: why do these conflicts exist despite attempts to avoid them? If status conflicts refer to merely a symbolic recognition, then they should arguably be easier to solve than conflicts stemming from competition for power and resources. Yet, status conflicts can be difficult to solve even when they were not conceived as zero-sum games. The article argues that status conflicts cannot be understood without the interplay of perceptions and emotions. First, what really matters is not objective status but perceptions thereof and there seems to be a gap how Russia and the West perceive status in general. Secondly, the perceptions of when status is gained or lost seem to be emotionally loaded. Russia is more willing to understand its relative status when military or economic issues are at stake, but if the dispute deals with international norms and questions of justice Russia is more likely to interpret Western action as violating its status and conversely, it is more likely to interpret its own action as enhancing its status when it is defending such values differently from the West.

An Adaptive Decision Concurrency Control Algorithm

For the lack of adaptability about the existing concurrency control algorithms, adaptive decision concurrency control algorithm is proposed. ADCC algorithm divides concurrency control process into two phases in: execution authorizing phase and strategy selecting phase. In execution authorizing phase, algorithm compares statistics and effectiveness of transactions to determine the execution order of conflict transactions. In strategy selecting phase, according to transactions’ read/write status and current conflict rate, algorithm selects optimistic/pessimistic conflict resolution strategy adaptively. Such selection mechanism makes ADCC algorithm have high efficiency no matter database system is busy or idle. Simulation experiment proves that ADCC algorithm this paper proposed is superior to classical strict two phases locking algorithm and hybrid concurrency control. So ADCC algorithm performs well in the period of concurrency control.

The Too-Much-Talent Effect: Team Interdependence Determines When More Talent Is Too Much or Not Enough

Five studies examined the relationship between talent and team performance. Two survey studies found that people believe there is a linear and nearly monotonic relationship between talent and performance: Participants expected that more talent improves performance and that this relationship never turns negative. However, building off research on status conflicts, we predicted that talent facilitates performance—but only up to a point, after which the benefits of more talent decrease and eventually become detrimental as intrateam coordination suffers. We also predicted that the level of task interdependence is a key determinant of when more talent is detrimental rather than beneficial. Three archival studies revealed that the too-much-talent effect emerged when team members were interdependent (football and basketball) but not independent (baseball). Our basketball analysis also established the mediating role of team coordination. When teams need to come together, more talent can tear them apart.

The countries’ benefits for cooperation in East sea

The complicated issues the East Sea relate to the strategies of major powers. The process of establishing Sino - U.S. in the 1970s and the failure of the U.S. in Vietnam War could be seen as an opportunity for China to expand its power in the East Sea. The crisis of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and the U.S. bogged down in the War on Terrorin later years created a favorable condition for China to enhance its status and foster conflicts in the East Sea. The Asia - Pacific region, with the increasingly and dynamic development, has attracted concerns of all major powers. The success of China’s economic reform and opening-up policy, along with the arms race and its publicdeclaration to monopolize the East Sea have driven China to be the central concern of the countries in the Asia – Pacific region. Thus, major powers have been forced to adjust their strategies for this region. Fully understanding the great powers’ strategic adjustmentswill help Vietnam response appropriately, combine internal strength with diplomatic struggle to build East Sea into a sea of peace, security and cooperation.

Casualties of Social Combat

We point to group processes of status conflict and norm enforcement as fundamental elements in the development of school-based victimization. Socially vulnerable youth are frequently harassed for violating norms, but the logic of status competition implies they are not the only victims: to the extent that aggression is instrumental for social climbing, increases in status should increase risk—at least until the pinnacle of the hierarchy is reached. Victimization causes serious harm, and, we argue, at the margin these consequences will be magnified by status. We test these ideas using longitudinal network data on friendship and victimization from 19 schools. For most students, status increases the risk of victimization. However, youth at the uppermost extremes of the school hierarchy—students in the top 5 percent of centrality and those with cross-gender friendships where such friendships are rare—sit just above the fray, unlikely to fall victim to their peers. As expected, females and physically or socially vulnerable youth are victimized at particularly high rates. Victims experience psychological distress and social marginalization, and these adverse effects are magnified by status. For most students, gains in status increase the likelihood of victimization and the severity of its consequences.

Positioning Migrant Physicians as Dr. Horror and Dr. Nice: <i>A study of status and affect in online discussion forums</i>

While ethnic hierarchies and labour market enclaves are commonly discussed at the macro level, this study focuses on a less explored area of research, namely, the study of ethnic and professional hierarchies on the level of mediated discourse. Taking various kinds of online discussion forums as the empirical entry point, this article sets out to answer if and how ethnicity, migrant background and/or language skills emerge as new hierarchical logics beside divisions, such as gender and education, when professional status is assigned online. Drawing on affect theory and the notion of status conflict, this article argues that in Finnish online discussion forums, the high-skilled migrant care worker is envisioned as a paradoxical figure who at the same time is seen as a saviour from abroad and an “affect alien” who causes confusion and discomfort. Both positions, the article argues, are the fruits of a narrow discursive construction of the commodified high-skilled migrant as “a servant” for our needs.

Members’ needs, intragroup conflict, and group performance.

Focusing on "what people want in their group" as a critical antecedent of intragroup conflict, the present study theorizes and empirically investigates the relationships among the psychological needs of group members, intragroup conflict, and group performance. It attends to the within-group average and dispersion of members' psychological needs and examines the effects stemming from group composition of needs on multiple types of conflict. The analyses based on multisource data from 145 organizational teams revealed significant relationships between the groups' composition with respect to the members' need for achievement and task conflict, need for affiliation and relationship conflict, and need for power and status conflict. Some of these relationships were moderated by open communication among members. The analyses also demonstrated that when the 3 types of conflict were considered together, task conflict was a positive predictor of group performance, whereas relationship conflict was a negative predictor. The findings highlight the motivational aspects of intragroup conflict, revealing the multilevel dynamics of the psychological needs in social settings.

Cricket, violence and social conflict: an Eliasian examination

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the claims made for the potential of sports such as cricket to reduce social conflict and engender peace.Design/methodology/approach– The use of an Eliasian sociological perspective to analyze historical documentary sources and contemporary media analyses of narratives of the role of violence and its regulation in cricket.Findings– Violence and its regulation interweave with the broader development of cricket and remain central concerns in status conflicts between competing social groups involved in the game. This ranges from evidence of an increasing internalization of expectations regarding the regulation of violence to the stratification of social groups according to beliefs about differing uses of and attitudes towards violence.Originality/value– This paper provides the first long-term analysis of violence trends in relation to cricket, and provides clarification of some problematic aspects of Elias’ sociological framework.

Blending Voices: Negotiating Educational Choices for Upper/Middle Class Well-Educated Interracial Couples' Children

Education is a critical parenting issue that may have a strong racial component. Using the framework of Cultural Contracts Theory, this study seeks to explore how interracial couples negotiate priorities on education as they raise their children. We found that couples' strategic choices displayed (a) distinct attitudes about the meaning of a good education, (b) distinct identification priorities depending on their particular minority background, and (c) the influence of intersecting factors such as generational variables related to socioeconomic status, immigrant background, and individual and partner conflict resolution style preferences. The choices also demonstrated tendencies to (a) identify overlapping roles common to each culture, (b) honor the mother's role, and (c) value 2 cultures and 2 perspectives. Unlike research marking interracial relationships as dysfunctional, interracial couples have the benefit of multiple perspectives and show willingness to have quasi-completed and cocreated cultural contracts with their spouses when negotiating their children's educational choices.

"Members’ Needs, Group Conflict, and Group Performance"

Focusing on “what people want in their groups” as a critical antecedent of conflict among them, the present research theorizes and empirically investigates the comprehensive relationship between within-group composition of psychological needs and group conflict based on multi-source data from 148 organizational teams. Utilizing within-group average and dispersion to capture the group-level composition of members’ need, the present study found significant relationships between the composition of need for achievement and task conflict, need for affiliation and relationship conflict, and need for power and status conflict. Some of these relationships were moderated by open communication among members. The analysis also demonstrated that when the three dimensions of conflict were considered together, task conflict was a positive predictor of group performance whereas relationship conflict was a negative predictor. The present findings highlight the significance of members’ psychological characteristics as predictors of various types of group conflict, revealing the multilevel dynamics of psychological needs of individuals in social settings.

Status Conflict in Groups

We introduce status conflicts—defined as disputes over people's relative status (i.e., respect) positions in their group's social hierarchy—as a key group process that affects task group performance. Using mixed research methods, we qualitatively identify the characteristics of status conflicts, validate a four-item survey scale that distinctly measures status conflict, and investigate the relationship between status conflict and group performance. We determine that status conflict exerts a significant negative main effect, moderates the effects of task conflict on group performance, and hurts performance by undermining information sharing more than other types of conflict do.

Statement from the Editor Regarding “Status Conflict in Groups”

In the original version of the paper “Status Conflict in Groups” by Corinne Bendersky and Nicholas A. Hays (Organization Science, Articles in Advance, August 4, 2010, DOI 10.1287/orsc.1100.0544), one of the variables in the hierarchical OLS regressions in Table 5 was misspecified. This was discovered by the authors after the online publication of the article in Articles in Advance. The accepting editor-in-chief, Daniel Levinthal, has chosen to retract the original published paper, allowing the authors the opportunity to resubmit a new paper that fully resolves those issues to the satisfaction of the authors and the journal.

Open Skies in turbulence, a well functioning treaty is endangered by outside developments

AbstractToday the Treaty on Open Skies is confronted with contradictory developments: Continuing adherence of all parties, in particular Russia and the United States to the treaty and preparations for modernisation of the technical monitoring capabilities on the one hand, while the general support for conventional arms control and military confidence building in the OSCE region declines. Since January 2011 an intervention of Turkey over the accession application of Cyprus has prevented any regular sessions and decisions of the Open Skies Consultative Commission ( OSCC ). The treaty is taken hostage for an unsolved status conflict which has much wider dimensions. Since the impasse in the OSCC could not be solved on the diplomatic level so far (Oct. 2011), high level political intervention is needed to save the treaty from erosion.

Status Deconstruction Theory: Status Conflict's Destabilization of Group Status Hierarchies

Despite strong evidence that task group status hierarchy instability is dysfunctional, little research has considered the processes that lead to hierarchy instability. In this paper, we examine the destabilizing effects of dissent about the hierarchy that is expressed as status conflict in the contexts of groups with varying levels of consensus about the status hierarchy. We find that group hierarchies are least stable when there is both a high level of status conflict and low consensus about the status hierarchy. We interpret this to mean that when status conflicts are expressed in groups with high levels of consensus, other group members are motivated to defend the hierarchy to restore normative order to the group. When status conflicts occur in groups with low underlying consensus, however, the conflicts surface latent dissensus and encourage revision of the status hierarchy. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice.

Society and Psychosis

The goal of Society and Psychosis is ambitious but necessary: to illuminate the path of future research regarding psychotic illnesses—in the editors' own words, “…to reflect these current trends in the study of society and psychosis, and to contribute to developing an agenda for future research” (p 6). The primary audience would be those who conduct and fund research on psychotic disorders; however, the clinician will find many worthy pearls in this collection of essays. The editors begin by asserting that psychiatry has now “rediscovered its roots,” accepting and exploring social and environmental factors in the etiology and course of psychotic illness and establishing a backdrop of tension between pharmacologic and social research. Society and Psychosis is organized into 3 main sections—theoretical foundations, social factors and the onset of psychosis, and social factors affecting the course and outcome of psychotic illnesses. Several of the nuggets unearthed through this comprehensive review are worth highlighting: childhood adversity and trauma are known risk factors for psychosis, and perhaps the mechanism involves the development of oversensitive threat appraisal resulting from the maltreatment. Children who live in single-parent homes or who spend time in institutional care are also at higher risk, but the question remains unanswered whether this correlation is the result of parental separation or some other set of associated risks, such as socioeconomic status or family conflict (chapter 7, “Childhood Adversity and Psychosis”). Many clinicians who treat psychosis recognize that cannabis will indeed trigger a psychosis that will result in an eventual (if not immediate) diagnosis of schizophrenia. Recent evidence indicates that cannabis interacts specifically with gene coding for the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) enzyme, which is relatively restricted to the prefrontal cortex and involved in the metabolism of dopamine. Adolescent-onset cannabis abusers have an overall increased risk of adult psychosis, with the greatest risk in the Val/Val genotype of the COMT gene. Further, cannabis abuse and COMT genotype also interact in predicting later depression. This genetic-environmental risk factor interaction is validating for the clinician who had observed it previously, and this understanding potentially opens many doors for further study (chapter 5, “Genes and Social Environment”). But the main premise of Society and Psychosis, that pharmacology is by definition at odds with social and genetic study, is flawed. This premise leads to the omission of any consideration of the new field and literature on pharmacogenetics, the area that tracks genetic markers associated with medication response and the genetics associated with medication side effects. Another shortcoming is the structure of such a book—specifically, a collection of separate articles culled and pasted together (from 26 authors in total). This format presents a challenge for distilling out a set of conclusions or determining a path for future research. The editors rightly point out in their summary the risk of reducing the book's recommendations to a set of cliches such as “protect the children” or “create programs for those at risk.” The main disappointment of Society and Psychosis is that, with so many questions and issues not fully resolved, the editors chose caution over courage. Understandably, caution is the norm in scientific discussion, but caution's twin is hesitancy. The ship moves on. Yes, to know where we have been is good, but to have new waters charted and to point out the unknown is better. Editors as knowledgeable as these now need to demonstrate courage. There is far too much valuable data to waste on cliches. A follow-up publication that gives specific directives would be welcomed. Andrew Farah, MD, FAPA High Point Regional Health Systems, High Point, North Carolina