Social Hierarchy: The Self-Reinforcing Nature of Power and Status

Magee & Galinsky · Power & Equity · Academy of Management Annals · 2008 · Paywalled

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Magee and Galinsky's review integrates research from psychology, sociology and organisations to argue that power and status are two important yet distinct bases of hierarchy, and to explain why both tend to be self-reinforcing. They define social hierarchy as an implicit or explicit rank order of individuals or groups with respect to a valued social dimension, and observe that it relentlessly rises up even against practices intended to suppress it. They discuss two functions it serves, order and coordination, and motivating individuals, while noting that it can and does have dysfunctional consequences. Status is the extent to which someone is respected or admired by others, who confer it; power is asymmetric control over valued resources in social relations, more a property of the actor. Power and status can each lead to the other, and can also come apart.

At its heart are three reinforcing mechanisms. Power transforms psychology: the powerful speak more, express their private opinions more readily, are unfazed by others' persuasion, act with more confidence, construe information more abstractly and take others' perspectives less, so that power begets more power. Subordinates who attempt upward influence, they write, are likely to feel their voice has fallen on deaf ears. Status is reinforced by expectations, through expectancy and behavioural confirmation, backlash that falls harder on low-status people, especially when they act above their rank, and the accumulation of better opportunities, with demographic stereotypes among the sources of those expectations. Hierarchy-enhancing beliefs, described by social dominance and system justification theories, reinforce hierarchy from the top down and the bottom up: low-ranking people, especially those who strongly endorse the legitimacy of inequality, can show out-group favouritism and sometimes serve high-ranking interests at the expense of their own. Even those with most to gain from disrupting a hierarchy, they argue, have some reason to forgo the attempt. Against this they set forces of attenuation, a challenge to their own thesis: external change, a concern for fairness, perceived illegitimacy, competition, and the limits set by reciprocity and status leakage.

The bridge to psychological safety is ours: we read the review as an account of how a power gradient tends to be sustained by the psychology, expectations and beliefs of people at every rank, including those it disadvantages, in ways that make it hard to challenge. Its stated assumptions and scope: its review of the psychology of power relies heavily on the assumption that experimental evidence, gathered predominantly in laboratory settings, reflects how power operates in organisations; its claims assume one main hierarchy in play at a time; the framework applies primarily to informal hierarchy and its interrelationship with formal hierarchy; and its functional account sets aside theories of domination, conflict and identity, which they grant help explain many phenomena.

Magee, J.C. and Galinsky, A.D. (2008) 'Social hierarchy: The self-reinforcing nature of power and status', Academy of Management Annals, 2(1), pp. 351-398.

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