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By Root 492 0

hierarchies are present in all social groups, because, as social psychologist Deborah Gruenfeld has told me, many people have trouble with hierarchical relationships. Some people resent having others in superior positions with more power and the authority to tell them what to do; they act on these feelings by becoming counterdependent and rebelling in ways large and small against authority. Some people are uncomfortable with having power over others, feeling that they don’t really deserve to be in positions where they get to control others. The people uncomfortable with their authority don’t exercise the leadership that others expect, failing to provide direction that leaves those they supervise lost and uncertain about what to do.

Empirical research demonstrates two facts about hierarchies. First, status is “imported” or “carried” from one setting to another. Personal characteristics that define status in the larger society—such as race, gender, age, and educational credentials—get imported into informal and formal organization settings and are used to create status hierarchies.14 Status, however derived, tends to generalize across the environments in which we interact. Jon Corzine could move from a leadership position in the investment bank Goldman Sachs to the U.S. Senate to the New Jersey governor’s mansion because his personal wealth and social ties could be redeployed and also because people assume that if you are smart enough to succeed in one highly competitive domain, you must be competent in other, even unrelated domains as well. One implication of this phenomenon for you is that the specific organization or domain in which you rise to power may matter less than the fact that you manage to achieve high-level status someplace. The prestige and power that come from achieving a senior position will generalize to some extent to other contexts, providing you with status there as well.

The second fact about hierarchies is that people seem to prefer them. In six experimental studies, social psychologist Larissa Tiedens and her colleagues examined the extent to which people perceived others as different from themselves (either higher or lower) in dominance. These perceptions of difference in dominance were motivated by the desire for positive task relationships as demonstrated by the fact that perceptions of difference in dominance were greater when people expected to interact with the other in task-related interactions. The interpretation was that when people expected to interact on a task, and particularly when task performance was important, they voluntarily constructed differences in hierarchy. This behavior shows that people prefer or expect such differences in status in task settings.15

Research by New York University social psychologist John Jost provides even stronger evidence that people seem to prefer hierarchical relationships. Jost’s research shows that people will voluntarily contribute to their own disempowerment to maintain a stable hierarchical social order. In a series of studies, Jost found that lower-power groups often developed attitudes that justified their own inferior (and others’ more favored) position, thereby contributing to the persistence of hierarchical arrangements that disadvantaged them. So, people attending a lower-status university would not bolster their university’s status compared to higher-status schools but accepted the fact of the lower status of their educational institution and the implications of that lowered status.16

If hierarchy is a fact of organizational life and, in fact, apparently preferred by people, then hierarchical arrangements will be omnipresent. When hierarchy exists, at least some proportion of people are going to want to enjoy the benefits of holding higher-rather than lower-status positions within hierarchies. Consequently, striving for status and power is going to be common in organizations and, because of its foundation in a hierarchical social order that people desire, will be impossible to eliminate.

INFLUENCE SKILLS ARE USEFUL FOR GETTING THINGS DONE