THE LESS-EDUCATED LEADING THE MORE-EDUCATED: EDUCATIONAL STATUS INCONGRUENCE IN TEAMS AND OUTSIDERS’ PERCEPTIONS AND INVESTMENT

Educational status incongruence, in which team leaders have lower educational status markers (such as having a lower level of education and graduating from sless prestigious schools) than their followers, is increasingly prevalent. We examine how educational status incongruence influences outsiders’ perceptions of teams and their willingness to invest in teams. Drawing on the status characteristics theory and status conflict literature, we argue that people evaluate teams with educational status incongruence as less likely to succeed and are less willing to invest money in them. We first tested our hypotheses with an archival dataset of 1,111 teams and 5,555 evaluations from technical experts and investors (Study 1). We then conducted pre-registered experiments and found that the effects of educational status incongruence were mediated by outsiders’ predictions of heightened status conflict in a team (Study 2), which outsiders perceived to cause negative outcomes (Study 3). Moreover, showing outsiders that a leader had credibility in the team mitigated the negative effects of educational status incongruence on outsider’s prediction about team success and their willingness to invest (Study 4). This mixed-method paper has theoretical implications for research on status incongruence and team perceptions while offering novel practical implications for teams attempting to obtain investment.