Competing for Attention: Competition, Cooperation, and the Salience of Power and Status

Recent research suggests that power and status can have divergent consequences on interpersonal outcomes. However, the implications of these findings for organizational research have been limited, given the reality that power and status are positively correlated in most real-world settings. In the present research, we consider when power versus status might be relatively more salient for leaders who have high levels of both. We theorize that competition and cooperation serve as cues to power and status, respectively. To the extent that leaders' power is more salient than their status, we predict that they will engage in self-oriented cognition and behavior, aligned with past research on power. Conversely, to the extent that leaders' status is more salient than their power, we predict that they will engage in other-oriented cognition and behavior, aligned with past research on status. We find support for our hypotheses in three studies.