THEORETICAL FOUNDATION AND HYPOTHSES
Status and status dissimilarity
People pursue status in social groups (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009). Firstly, what is status? In the existing literature, quite a lot of overlaps exist with the definitions of status. Among them, respect is widely recognized as indicators of peoples’ position and status within social collectives (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Bendersky & Shah, 2013). Thus, to put it explicitly, status is defined as the respect ones receive from others in a social collective. Individuals’ status tells whether the focal persons are accepted and valued by group member. Based on relational demography perspective (Tsui, Egan, & O'Reilly, 1992), I define status dissimilarity as the extent to which an …show more content…
Based on Affective Event Theory (AET, Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996), it is proposed that status dissimilarity could exert impacts on emotions, since individual status matters in terms of self-esteem, and self-esteem is believed to be closely associated with particular emotions that pertain to how people feel about themselves (Brown & Marshall, 2001).
The job-related affective well-being model (Russell, 1980; Warr, 1987; Van Katwyk, Fox, Spector & Kelloway, 2000), categorizing human’s emotional response into to two bipolar dimensions of pleasure and arousal, is considered here to capture individuals’ affective response to status-dissimilar others. In this model, pleasure refers to the valence of emotional actions, ranging from positive side to negative side. And arousal refers to the intensity of emotional actions, ranging from high to low (Lane, Chua, & Dolan, 1999). This model clearly identifies four sets of emotions: high pleasure and high arousal (HPHA) (e.g., excited), high pleasure and low arousal (HPLA) (e.g., calm), low pleasure and high arousal (LPHA) (e.g., angry), and low pleasure and low arousal (LPLA) (e.g., gloomy). And the job-related affective well-being model has been empirically supported (Van Katwyk et al., …show more content…
In the relational demography literature, usually, individuals with relatively high status-latent characteristics, such as male, and White, are inclined to react more saliently compared with their counterparts, such as female, and non-White, to the dissimilarity in the corresponding characteristics. For example, sex dissimilarity has stronger effects on men rather than on women in terms of their identification to the work groups and perceived conflicts within groups (Chattopadhyay, George & Shulman, 2008; Chattopadyhay, George & Lawrence, 2004). Following this reasoning, for higher status members and lower status members, the effects of status dissimilarity on their affective responses are different. Higher status members respond negatively to status dissimilarity, because they view working with lower status members, as a threat to their self-esteem, and believe that lower status members downplay the positivity of the group prototype. On the other hand, lower-status persons are likely to be sensitive to the potential gains by working with higher-status members, such as enhancing their image by being grouped together with higher-status members, although they may realize some drawbacks of being the relatively lower status members in the group, such as being neglected or devalued. Therefore, it is proposed that higher status members have a more vigorously affective response to status dissimilarity than the lower status
Status and status dissimilarity
People pursue status in social groups (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009). Firstly, what is status? In the existing literature, quite a lot of overlaps exist with the definitions of status. Among them, respect is widely recognized as indicators of peoples’ position and status within social collectives (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Bendersky & Shah, 2013). Thus, to put it explicitly, status is defined as the respect ones receive from others in a social collective. Individuals’ status tells whether the focal persons are accepted and valued by group member. Based on relational demography perspective (Tsui, Egan, & O'Reilly, 1992), I define status dissimilarity as the extent to which an …show more content…
Based on Affective Event Theory (AET, Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996), it is proposed that status dissimilarity could exert impacts on emotions, since individual status matters in terms of self-esteem, and self-esteem is believed to be closely associated with particular emotions that pertain to how people feel about themselves (Brown & Marshall, 2001).
The job-related affective well-being model (Russell, 1980; Warr, 1987; Van Katwyk, Fox, Spector & Kelloway, 2000), categorizing human’s emotional response into to two bipolar dimensions of pleasure and arousal, is considered here to capture individuals’ affective response to status-dissimilar others. In this model, pleasure refers to the valence of emotional actions, ranging from positive side to negative side. And arousal refers to the intensity of emotional actions, ranging from high to low (Lane, Chua, & Dolan, 1999). This model clearly identifies four sets of emotions: high pleasure and high arousal (HPHA) (e.g., excited), high pleasure and low arousal (HPLA) (e.g., calm), low pleasure and high arousal (LPHA) (e.g., angry), and low pleasure and low arousal (LPLA) (e.g., gloomy). And the job-related affective well-being model has been empirically supported (Van Katwyk et al., …show more content…
In the relational demography literature, usually, individuals with relatively high status-latent characteristics, such as male, and White, are inclined to react more saliently compared with their counterparts, such as female, and non-White, to the dissimilarity in the corresponding characteristics. For example, sex dissimilarity has stronger effects on men rather than on women in terms of their identification to the work groups and perceived conflicts within groups (Chattopadhyay, George & Shulman, 2008; Chattopadyhay, George & Lawrence, 2004). Following this reasoning, for higher status members and lower status members, the effects of status dissimilarity on their affective responses are different. Higher status members respond negatively to status dissimilarity, because they view working with lower status members, as a threat to their self-esteem, and believe that lower status members downplay the positivity of the group prototype. On the other hand, lower-status persons are likely to be sensitive to the potential gains by working with higher-status members, such as enhancing their image by being grouped together with higher-status members, although they may realize some drawbacks of being the relatively lower status members in the group, such as being neglected or devalued. Therefore, it is proposed that higher status members have a more vigorously affective response to status dissimilarity than the lower status