Beyond Consensus: A Theory of Dyadic Status Perception

Status hierarchies are ubiquitous with social interaction and have important consequences for individuals in groups. Scholarship on antecedents of status rests on the assumption that group members agree on the status hierarchy, however a nascent literature has revealed that there is considerable disagreement amongst group members. We address this nascent literature and present a new theoretical lens to status by developing and testing predictions relating to the dyadic nature of status perceptions in groups. We hypothesize that a substantial amount of variance in status perceptions is explained at the dyadic level, calling into question the previously assumed consensus status conferral process. We further propose that dyadic similarity on deep-level attributes positively shapes status perceptions, where we examine the specific role of extraversion congruence on status. We find support for our predictions in a field study of 980 dyads in 39 teams and a controlled study of 174 dyads in 36 groups.