Do We Agree on Who’s in Charge Here? Status Dissensus Antecedents and Impact on Team Performance

We explore the extent to which individuals in a team may have different perceptions of how much status each team member deserves, and consequently of what the team’s status hierarchy looks like, and how this status dissensus ultimately impacts team performance. Given that our perceptions of status, as well as our processes of assessing and conferring status, are likely to be strongly shaped and influenced by our cultural background, we examine the antecedents and consequences of status dissensus in the context of multicultural teams. Analyzing data from a large-scale global student collaboration project including 3,775 students from over 150 countries (719 teams in total), we find that the degree of multicultural diversity in the team, measured by the Blau index, significantly increases the likelihood of dissensus within the team regarding the status hierarchy, and that this status dissensus in turn significantly harms team performance, even when controlling for multicultural diversity.