Status Dissimilarity

Rather than using demographic characteristics as status-latent variables to investigate the effects of status dissimilarity as relational demography literature does, this research directly investigates status that is defined as the respect ones receive from others within a group, and examine the implications of status dissimilarity in groups. It is hypothesized that the interaction between status dissimilarity and individual status level is negatively associated with group members’ identification through the mechanism of emotions. And the effects are believed to be stronger for relatively higher status members. Based on a sample of MBA students, the hypotheses are mostly supported: being different from others in status could cause more low

Usually, within a social hierarchy, people hold different hierarchical positions. People usually correlate their status with their self-concept, such as self-esteem and self-worth (De Cremer & Tyler, 2005). Accordingly, social hierarchy could exert influence on individuals’ psychological states so that people in different status position could react differently to the status distribution (Podolny, 2005; Westphal & Zajac, 1995). Current researches on status covers the influential factors of the emergence of status, such as dominant personality (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009), hubristic and authentic pride (Cheng, Tracy & Henrich, 2010); the dynamics with status, such as status conflict (Bendersky & Hays, 2012) and status mobility (Bendersky & Shah, 2013). Thus, a lot of room is left to investigate the implications of status hierarchy in

Although it is a trend suggested by researcher (Brown, 2000), few researches investigated whether emotion could function as mechanism to transmit the influence of individual similarity / dissimilarity on their attitudes and behaviors in work groups. The extant literature has offered rationale to bring in the mediation effects of emotions: the Affective event theory (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996), offering hints that work events could be proximal cause of affective reactions; and cognition-emotion-action model (Weiner, 1980), supporting that the individual’s cognitive appraisals of work events could elicit certain kinds of emotion, and consequently, individuals’ intentions or behaviors could be influenced by emotions. Specifically, a two dimensional emotion model on pleasure and arousal will be elucidated in this research. By investigating the mediation effects of emotions, this study could contribute to the research on the “black box” between status dissimilarity and group identification. Specifically, a two-dimension affective model on pleasure and arousal (Russell, 1980) is applied in this research to capture ones’ emotions in a more accurate