Status Hierarchies in Teams: the Interaction Between Hierarchy Level and Hierarchy Shape

Over the past decades, several research streams have been focusing on the influence of status hierarchies on team performance. Synthesizing these research streams is argued to be an important next step in increasing our understanding of the status hierarchy – team performance relationship (Greer, Schouten, De Jong, & Dannals, 2015). In this paper, we synthesize conventional wisdom from the diversity literature and the status literature. Within the status literature, status hierarchies are often conceptualized and measured as the level of status hierarchies, i.e. how widely individuals’ status scores are distributed within the team (e.g., Boone & Hendriks, 2009; Haleblian & Finkelstein, 1993). The diversity literature proposes, however, that status hierarchies are characterized by their shape, i.e. the form of the distribution of status scores within the team (Harrison & Klein, 2007). In this study, we suggest that both the level and the form of status hierarchies are imperative features in understanding the impact of status hierarchies. Based on a sample composed of 127 student teams, we illustrate that a more positive skew in the status hierarchy reinforces the negative effect of status hierarchy level on team performance, mediated by impaired information elaboration.