Looking up with a frown: status, negative affect and enhancement behaviour in groups

ABSTRACT

This manuscript aims to address existing ambiguity on the behavioural consequences of (low) status in groups by examining mechanisms and moderating factors in the linkage between individual members’ lack of status and their attempts at improving their status position. Specifically, we propose an indirect relationship between a group member’s lack of status and enhancement behaviour, through his or her high-arousal negative affective reactions, and we cast a member’s status striving as a key motivational boundary condition for this indirect association. We tested our predictions across three studies, namely (1) a scenario experiment, (2) a critical-incident recall design and (3) an organizational survey study. Results demonstrated an interactive relationship of perceived status and status striving with high-arousal negative affect, such that lower (rather than higher) status triggered high-arousal negative affective reactions among individuals with higher (but not lower) status striving. Moreover, a group member’s high-arousal negative affect was positively related with his or her enhancement behaviour. Together, these findings shed new light on key psychological mechanism and contingency factors that may explicate individuals’ diverse behavioural reactions towards a lack of status in groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Status
• status striving
• negative affect
• enhancement behaviour

Acknowledgments

We thank Joachim Hüffmeier and Andreas Bausch for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although we believe high-arousal negative affect is particularly important in the present conceptual framework, we also explored the potential roles of low-arousal negative affect as well as high-arousal and low-arousal positive affect. These results are summarized in the Supplementary Analyses section.

2. Whereas the average completion time for the study was 9.96 min, these seven participants completed the study in less than 3 min. Importantly, our pre-tests showed that it was impossible to read all items and instructions in this time. We note, however, that the results and conclusions remained robust when including or excluding these seven participants.

3. For exploratory reasons, we also tested whether status striving may serve as a moderator for the direct relationship between perceived status and enhancement behaviour. In line with our theoretical framework, however, we did not find consistent evidence for a direct interactive relation of status and status striving with enhancement behaviour across our three studies. Details on these additional analyses are available from the first author.

4. Controlling for the mode of survey administration did not alter the conclusions from our hypotheses tests.

5. Prior research has shown that status and power may jointly influence an individual’s attitudes and behaviours (e.g., Anicich et al., 2016). In the present data, however, there was no significant status x subjective power interaction on high-arousal negative affect (B = −.00, SE = .00, p = .39), enhancement behaviour (B = .00, SE = .00, p = .99) or self-promotion behaviour (B = .00, SE = .00, p = .52).

6. Details on all of the analyses described in this section are available from the first author.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.