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Matthew or Martha? Positive and Negative Returns to High Status Among Organizational Elites

Professor Joe Porac
Description
Semester:
- Winter 2008
Speakers:
Lecture Time:
Fri, March 7, 2008 @ 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Lecture Location:
Room E1550, Ross School of Business
Speaker Webpage(s):
http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/facultyindex.cgi?id=326
Introduced By:
No introduction available.
Abstract
Much research in the study of organizations and strategy suggest that high status actors benefit from their privileged position in the social order. They are given the benefit of the doubt in ambiguous situations, they having access to resources that are beyond the reach of those of lesser status, and they are connected in more central ways to important social networks. Moreover, these benefits seem not to be isolated to the actors themselves but also extend to others with whom they associate, a sort of “diffusion” of status across personal and organizational boundaries. In a self-reinforcing way, then, we would expect that there are strong forces at work leading to “the rich getting richer” in social space.
But we also know that life at the top of pecking orders is fraught with peril. Some of the danger comes from the very audiences and publics that have conferred the high status to begin with. There is more scrutiny, more attention, greater demands, and higher expectations for achievements in the future. There is also envy, jealousy, and attempts to cut “tall poppies down to size” in order to equilibrate social relationships. Some of the danger also comes from within the high status actor himself/herself. Climbing social ladders successfully can breed overconfidence, hubris, and overestimations of one’s own importance. This is a volatile mix when situations call for cool headedness and realistic expected values. Thus, in contrast to the “rich getting richer” hypothesis, some have suggested that success contains the seeds of its own destruction, that life at the top brings inevitable “burdens of celebrity” that, if not managed successfully, will bring high status actors down. And, ironically, research suggests that the stigma of being “cut down to size” diffuses as well, and even more pervasively than high status.
This talk is a compilation of a series of papers and ongoing data collection efforts exploring these Janus-like properties of high status within the top management teams of some of America’s largest publicly traded corporations. The grist for our discussion will be CEOs who have been singled out in the business press and categorized as “stars”. We want to know how this categorization affects a CEO’s own outcomes and those of the corporations that he/she leads. We also want to know whether these effects are contingent upon certain types of industry or business situations. We also want to know how a CEO’s star status affects those who work for them on their immediate management team. In the course of our discussion, we’ll have occasion to traverse various literatures on status and its effects, and we’ll end with some speculative insights into the role of fame and fortune in the lives of CEOs working at the top of corporations.
Recording & Additional Notes
No recordings available.
Introducer: Olenka Kacperczyk, Ph.D. Student, Management & Organizations