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In an effort to understand and quantify how informal status emerges, we set out to develop and test a theoretical model of informal status in organizations. We did so by putting forth several hypotheses and then testing them against data gathered from three different types of organizations. And the results – some of them quite unexpected – shed some interesting light. Power can be defined as the ability to influence others. But people with power are not always respected and held in high regard. In other words, they don’t always have status commensurate with their rung in the organizational ladder. In any group, members assess others’ personal attributes and behaviors and assign greater value – and ultimately informal status – to those they deem more likely to make greater contributions to shared objectives. And when individuals behave in ways that contradict shared objectives, they can be punished with social neglect, or even ridicule. Informal status emerges naturally from social interactions and can be distinguished from a person’s formal position or rank. And while informal status might be correlated with social connectedness, one can easily imagine individuals who have high informal status but do not hold advantaged positions in social networks – such as highly esteemed yet reclusive academics.
Status Perceptions Achieving high consensus on the informal status order is likely a complex and difficult task in organizations. People in organizations work on multiple tasks, value different types of work differently, and may have little contact with one another. But such social interaction is nonetheless set within a social system of agreed-upon ideals. Further, the richness of information coworkers have about one another – gleaned through working with them directly or hearing about them via second-hand sources – should contribute to its reliability. Finally, the advantages that are associated with high informal status tend to be highly visible. People with high informal status are given more control over interaction patterns and resources, more opportunities, and more social and material support. We therefore start by predicting (Hypothesis 1) that: Individuals in organizations will consensually perceive informal status differences among their coworkers.
Since values are prioritized differently across organizations, it follows that the characteristics that lead to high informal status should also differ across organizations. But there should also be some characteristics and behaviors that uniformly lead to higher informal status across organizations. These include an individual’s skills and experiences that contribute to the organization’s core technologies, which rise with a person’s familiarity with the organization’s history. We therefore suppose (Hypothesis 3) that: Individuals’ tenure in the organization will be positively related to their informal status. Similarly, across organizations, individuals’ contributions to the shared technical objectives will likely be assessed, in part, by their ability to facilitate the completion of important tasks. Therefore we posit (Hypothesis 4) that: Individuals’ job performance will be positively related to their informal status.
Organizational Behavior
To test these hypotheses, we examined three organizations: (1) an engineering department within a telecommunications firm. Comprising primarily engineers and technicians, it included some general managers and administrative support individuals; (2) a family medicine department of a research hospital, comprising four separate health clinics, each managed by medical doctors and populated by medical and administrative staff, as well as a centralized staff of administrators and faculty; and (3) a consulting firm that specialized in brand and image development, comprising employees in three different regional offices. The staff includes artistic designers, computer programmers, business professionals, and administrative and general management support. We collected data in informal interviews, from human resource departments, and through surveys of all members of each department involved. The surveys allowed us to obtain peer-ratings of informal status and social connectedness, self-reports of tenure with the company, stable behavioral patterns, race, socioeconomic status, education level, and ratings of the organization’s values. The total sample included 427 participants, divided roughly between the three organizations. We used peer-ratings to measure informal status. Each participant was asked to rate 10 randomly selected coworkers on how much status he or she had, from 1 = (“low”) to 7 = (“high”), where status was defined as the amount of “prestige or social standing” each member had. Participants’ jobs were assigned the formal rank their occupation held relative to the other jobs in their organization. In the engineering firm, support staff received a “1,” while managers received a “4.” Similar gradations were made in the hospital department and consulting firm.
To measure the extent to which individuals behaved in ways valued by their organization, we assessed the values of each organization through informal interviews and then assessed individuals’ stable patterns of behavior through self-report measures of personality. We observed differences between the three organizations in how much they emphasized tangible results, or the “bottom line,” and in their focus on teamwork and collaboration. These dimensions closely mirrored what researchers Charles O'Reilly, Jennifer Chatman, and David Caldwell in 1991 labeled “outcome-orientation” and “team-orientation.” To measure their firm’s outcome-orientation, participants rated the extent to which each of six dimensions characterized their organization: result or outcome-oriented, detail-oriented, reward-oriented, decisive, aggressive, and competitive. For team-orientation, participants rated the extent to which each of five dimensions characterized their organization: team-oriented, group-oriented, people-oriented, supportive, and cooperative. Each dimension was rated on a scale from 1 (“Extremely uncharacteristic”) to 7 (“Extremely characteristic”). The engineering department was rated as valuing outcome-oriented dimensions of culture more than the hospital department, which was in turn followed by the consulting firm. The consulting firm was rated as highest on team-orientation, followed by the hospital department, followed by the engineering department. Based on these assessments, we focused on two personality dimensions that provided the best content matches to the organizational value-dimensions of outcome- and team-orientation. First, Conscientiousness, which is a personality dimension that “facilitates task- and goal-directed behavior;” conscientious individuals are dutiful, hard-working, and organized. Second, we focused on Extraversion, which is a personality trait that involves an “energetic approach to the social and material world and includes traits such as sociability, activity, assertiveness, and positive emotionality.” In the workplace, Conscientiousness has been linked with diligence in tasks, whereas Extraversion has been shown to predict job performance in occupations that require interpersonal skills, such as in sales positions. A rich literature on status characteristics has shown that demographic characteristics such as sex, race, or socioeconomic status can become salient status characteristics. As a result, we assessed and controlled for sex, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and education in our analyses of origins of informal status.
Results What did our results find? Hypothesis 1 predicted that organizational members would reliably perceive informal status differences among the coworkers in their department. And indeed, we found that in all three organizations, a consensus had emerged among coworkers as to who had high and who had low informal status.
As shown in Table 1, the strength of the relation between Extraversion and informal status was highest in the consulting firm, followed by the hospital department, followed by the engineering department. That means Extraversion was a stronger predictor of informal status in the consulting firm than it was in the engineering department and that it was in the hospital department. Figure 1b illustrates graphically the difference between the consulting firm and the engineering department. Hypotheses 3 and 4 predicted that tenure and job performance, respectively, would be related to informal status. But tenure turned out to be a significant contributor to informal status only in the consulting firm. And job performance, which could be gauged only in the consulting firm, proved to be significantly related to informal status. In Hypotheses 5 and 6, we predicted informal status would be related to structural position within the organization’s formal hierarchy, and to social connectedness, respectively. In all three organizations, in fact, informal status was significantly related to formal rank. Similarly, informal status was independently and directly related to social connectedness in all three organizations. But in our study, informal status differences were moderately related to, but clearly distinct from, the formal organizational hierarchy and from patterns of social connectedness.
Implications
It is also clear that emergent informal status differences are associated with organizations’ unique values. In the engineering department, which valued task-oriented over socially-oriented behavior, being diligent and task-focused led to status but being sociable and talkative did not. In contrast, in the consulting firm, which valued socially-oriented over task-oriented behavior, being talkative and sociable led to status but being diligent and task-oriented did not. Our study showed that the presumed link between task abilities and domain-specific status characteristics is not so tight. Rather, we found that upholding and projecting the values of the organization, independent from experience in the organization or even job performance, was an important source of informal status. In contrast to a long tradition of research on ad hoc groups, the demographic variables included in our analyses as controls did not emerge as independent contributors to informal status. Sex and ethnicity did not have an effect on informal status in any of the three organizations. This may reflect the “relevancy” principle of Expectation States theory, which holds that diffuse characteristics such as sex and race are less relevant when other more relevant information – such as behavior, expertise, and job performance to gauge their status – is available. Due to some of the limitations of the current research, a number of questions need further examination. First, given the small number of organizations, we could not statistically test the relation between group values and the traits that lead to status. Future work should focus on the importance of status to individual organizational members and examine the importance of informal status to the dynamics of organizations at the collective level. As a system of social rewards and punishments, informal status hierarchies might provide a robust and powerful way to control employees’ behavior. It is therefore crucial to understand whether these social rewards and punishments are shaping employee behavior in ways that managers wish them to. Sandra E. Spataro is assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. Cameron Anderson is assistant professor of management at NYU Stern. |
nyone who has ever worked in a
corporation knows that titles and positions can give employees
leverage over one another. But researchers have also concluded
that individuals with higher informal status – the
level of respect and prestige they enjoy among coworkers – can
be at a distinct advantage. They are given better opportunities,
get more support when needed, and are awarded more credit when they
succeed. Indeed, individuals sometimes strive harder for informal
status than they do for formal promotions or higher financial compensation.
And as informal collaboration and teamwork have become more important
in the 21st century corporation, it’s likely that informal
status is growing even more significant.
The characteristics and behaviors
that lead to high status in any given group are derived from the
group’s specific goals. A
research group will value behaviors that contribute to the group’s
success, such as new discoveries. But being an effective researcher
might not lead to status in a group of salespeople. What’s
more, organizations prioritize not only the completion of any single
task, but also the success and future vitality of the organization
itself. As a result, (Hypothesis 2) holds that: Informal status will
likely be accorded to those who both represent and reinforce the
organization’s distinctive values. 
ndividuals with high formal rank
typically have responsibilities more important to the organization’s success. And fulfilling
more important duties is generally construed by peers as making a
stronger contribution to the group. So we also propose (Hypothesis
5) that: Individuals’ rank in an organization’s formal
hierarchy will be positively related to their informal status. Finally,
once individuals attain high levels of respect and esteem among peers,
they become more central in the flow of communication. People seek
them out for information or advice, to pass along ideas, or simply
to seek their companionship. And so we speculated (Hypothesis 6)
that: The amount individuals interact with others will be positively
related to their informal status.
e assessed social connectedness
using peer-ratings. Participants rated the same 10 coworkers on
how much they interacted with each of them, on a scale from 1 =
(“Never”) to 7 = (“All
the time”). We were able to obtain job performance data in
the consulting firm in the form of manager evaluations of performance.
Ratings were on a scale of 1 (“Rarely or never meets expectations/Red
flag”) to 5 (“Consistently exceeds expectations/Top performer/
Leader”). In the surveys, participants reported tenure in their
organization, coded in number of months.
ased on our assessments of the
three organization’s values,
we conducted two tests of Hypothesis 2, which held that informal
status will likely be accorded to those who both represent and reinforce
the organization’s distinctive values. First, we hypothesized
Conscientiousness would most strongly relate to informal status in
the engineering department, followed by the hospital department,
then by the consulting firm. Second, we hypothesized Extraversion
would most strongly relate to informal status in the consulting firm,
followed by the hospital department, then by the engineering department. 
rior research has documented
other benefits individuals enjoy when they possess values that
are consistent with their organization: higher satisfaction, lower
turnover, and increased organizational commitment. Our research
suggests that those who possess such values could also achieve
positions of power and influence in organizations through higher
informal status. In other words, individuals who attain high levels
of respect and esteem among their peers garner influence over their
coworkers’ attitudes, work habits, performance levels,
and satisfaction with the organization. Organizations appear to promote
culturally appropriate behavior not only through formal means, such
as the allocation of bonuses, bigger offices, and promotions but
also through informal means – namely, the allocation of high
informal status among peers.