Disponible en Dadun la tesis «More than a consensus: On the nature, antecedents and effects of status» de William James Fawson.

Resumen: Status is the relative extent that individuals are respected and admired in groups. Decades of research in Management and other fields of academia have advanced collective knowledge of the nature, antecedents and effects of status. However, this work has almost entirely conceptualised status through the consensus that emerges in groups. In this dissertation, I argue that status encompasses all flows of respect and admiration, whether these are agreed-upon in the consensus or not. Thereafter, I focus on dyadic status effects, which are status perceptions that emerge in dyadic relationships but are not reflected in the consensus. I demonstrate that a substantial amount of variance in status perceptions can be attributed to dyadic status effects across three diverse empirical samples (N = 12,464 status perceptions). I highlight that these effects were most likely to be generated by those at the top or bottom of the hierarchy (but not in the middle), and in dyadic relationships where the constituents held more distant (rather than closer) status positions. Next, I elaborate on a mechanism that explains the emergence of dyadic status effects across groups. In a study of status perceptions from online discussions in 149 groups (N = 1,670 status observations), I show that participants reciprocated positive dyadic status effects when they shared similar levels of extraversion. However, this only emerged when it involved participants with low levels of narcissism. Instead, those with high levels of narcissism did not reciprocate status in this manner. Lastly, I demonstrate an important implication of dyadic status effects in a five-month longitudinal study of N = 324 individuals in 47 groups. Specifically, I show that participants experienced lower psychological safety, which indirectly undermined group performance, when they generated more dyadic status effects. I close this dissertation by discussing my contributions to Management theory and outlining a rich set of possibilities for future research that build on my findings.

La tesis ha sido defendida en diciembre de 2025 y ha sido dirigida por Anneloes Reas y Sebastien Brion.