Communication Breakdown: The Importance of Status Coordination Norms for Group Cohesion

• In Event: 4148 - Norms, Culture, and Cooperation

Abstract

It is a classic sociological paradox that status hierarchies generate struggles over status (Bendersky & Hays 2017) and inequality in emotions (Lovaglia and Houser 1996; Tiedens, Ellsworth, and Mesquita 2000) yet are extremely stable (Berger et al. 1977; Anderson & Brown 2010). How can people in status-differentiated groups feel emotionally attached to their groups when some members are granted less respect and value than others (Lovaglia and Houser 1998; Tiedens, Ellsworth, and Mesquita 2000; Ridgeway and Nakagawa 2017)? We propose a simple, but powerful answer: the organizing rules of status help groups smoothly coordinate task interactions, and that successful coordination creates good feelings, which promotes group members’ commitment to their group. In other words, status hierarchies are associated with norms that help groups get on “the same page” and allow them to coordinate effectively as a social unit rather than as disparate individuals. We examine this proposition in two ways. First, by qualitatively examining participant accounts of group interaction on shared tasks for the existence of coordination norms, and second, by running a vignette experiment to test whether people actually hold norms that associate status hierarchies with smooth coordination more than they do for non-status differentiated groups. In doing so, we generalize insights from Expectation States Theory (Berger et al. 1977; Berger, Wagner, & Webster 2014) and the Theory of Social Commitments (Lawler, Thye & Yoon 2009) to analyze the role of status hierarchies themselves as well as individual status positions.

Authors

• Nicholas Heiserman, University of South Carolina

• Lynn Gencianeo Chin, Washington and Lee University

• Jon Overton, Kent State University