Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Past research on pay dispersion has found that hierarchy hurts commitment, cooperation, and performance. In contrast, functional theories of social hierarchy propose that hierarchy can facilitate coordination and performance. We investigated the effects of hierarchical differentiation using a sample of professional basketball teams from the National Basketball Association (NBA). Analyses of archival data revealed that hierarchical differentiation in pay and participation enhanced team performance by facilitating intragroup coordination and cooperation.

This research examines how two dimensions of moral intensity involved in a corporation's external crisis response — magnitude of effectiveness and interpersonal proximity — influence observer perceptions of and behavioral intentions toward the corporation. Across three studies, effectiveness decreased negative perceptions and increased pro-organizational intentions via ethical judgment of the response. Moreover, the two dimensions interacted such that a response high in proximity but low in effectiveness led to more negative perceptions and to less pro-organizational intentions.

Five experiments investigated the effect of power on social distance. Although increased social distance has been suggested to be an underlying mechanism for a number of the effects of power, there is little empirical evidence directly supporting this claim. Our first three experiments found that power increases social distance toward others. In addition, these studies demonstrated that this effect is (a) mediated by self-sufficiency and (b) moderated by the perceived legitimacy of power — only when power is seen as legitimate, does it increase social distance.

The current research explored the neural mechanisms linking social status to perceptions of the social world. Two fMRI studies provide converging evidence that individuals lower in social status are more likely to engage neural circuitry often involved in "mentalizing" or thinking about others' thoughts and feelings.

The current paper reviews the concept of power and offers a new architecture for understanding how power guides and shapes consumer behavior. Specifically, we propose that having and lacking power respectively foster agentic and communal orientations that have a transformative impact on perception, cognition, and behavior. These orientations shape both who and what consumers value. New empirical evidence is presented that synthesizes these findings into a parsimonious account of how power alters consumer behavior as a function of both product attributes and recipients.

The current research investigated how patterns of home and host cultural identification can explain which individuals who have lived abroad achieve the greatest creative and professional success. We hypothesized that individuals who identified with both their home and host cultures (i.e., biculturals) would show enhanced creativity and professional success compared with individuals who identified with only a single culture (i.e., assimilated and separated individuals).

Five experiments tested the hypothesis that there is a bi-directional link between ideological (multiculturalism and color-blindness) and self-regulatory (perspective-taking and stereotype-suppression) approaches to managing diversity. A first set of experiments found that exposure to multiculturalism facilitated perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective-taking.

Four experiments examined the effects of perspective taking on processes contributing to stereotype maintenance: biases in social memory, behavior explanations, and information seeking. The first two experiments explored whether perspective taking influences memory and spontaneous explanations for stereotype-relevant behaviors. Relative to participants in an objective-focus condition, perspective takers exhibited better recall of stereotype-inconsistent behaviors (Experiment 1) and spontaneously generated more dispositional explanations for them (Experiment 2).

Purpose — This chapter provides a framework that captures the fundamental impacts of power at the individual, dyadic, small group, and organizational levels. Within each level, we trace the psychological, cognitive, and behavioral consequences of having or lacking power.

Approach — We integrate theoretical approaches from psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, and organizational theory to underscore the far-reaching effects that power has.