Hierarchical cultural values predict success and mortality in high-stakes teams

Self- and Other-Orientation in High Rank: A Cultural Psychological Approach to Social Hierarchy

PUBLIC ABSTRACT

Social hierarchy is one fundamental aspect of human life, structuring interactions in families, teams, and entire societies. In this review, we put forward a new theory about how social hierarchy is shaped by the wider societal contexts (i.e., cultures). Comparing East Asian and Western cultural contexts, we show how culture comprises societal beliefs about who can raise to high rank (e.g., become a leader), shapes interactions between high- and low-ranking individuals (e.g., in a team), and influences human thought and behavior in social hierarchies. Overall, we find cultural similarities, in that high-ranking individuals are agentic and self-oriented in both cultural contexts. But we also find important cross-cultural differences. In East Asian cultural contexts, high-ranking individuals are also other oriented; they are also concerned about the people around them and their relationships. We close with a call to action, suggesting studying social hierarchies in more diverse cultural contexts.

Collectivism Impairs Team Performance When Relational Goals Conflict With Group Goals

This research challenges the idea that teams from more collectivistic cultures tend to perform better. We propose that in contexts in which there are tradeoffs between group goals (i.e., what is best for the group) and relational goals (i.e., what is best for one's relationships with specific group members), people in less collectivistic cultures primarily focus on group goals but those in more collectivistic cultures focus on both group and relational goals, which can lead to suboptimal decisions. An archival analysis of 100 years of data across three major competitive team sports found that teams from more collectivistic nations consistently underperformed, even after controlling for a number of nation and team characteristics. Three follow-up studies with 108 Chinese soccer players, 109 Singapore students, and 119 Chinese and the U.S. adults provided evidence for the underlying mechanism (i.e., prioritizing relational goals over group goals). Overall, this research suggests a more balanced view of collectivism, highlighting an important context in which collectivism can impair team performance.

Violence and Clinical Learning Environments in Medical Residencies

INTRODUCTION

The objective of this study was to describe and analyze residents' perceptions of characteristics on the expansive/restrictive continuum of their clinical learning environment.

METHODS

We conducted a quantitative, descriptive and cross-sectional study. A self-administered questionnaire was designed, programmed and applied to residents at the Faculty of Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The instrument was structured in eight sections, and for this article, Section 3, which referred to clinical environments and violence was considered. The questionnaire had an 85% response rate, with 12,612 residents from 113 medical units and 78 specialties participating. The reliability and internal consistency measured with alpha omega obtained a value of ω 0.835 (CI; 0.828-0.843).

RESULTS

Unpleasant, competitive, tense and conflictive contexts were related to restrictive environments. Sexual orientation influenced the perception of intolerance in the clinical setting with respect to discriminatory comments, such that for gender minorities, the environment was experienced as exclusionary. First-year residents perceived environments as more aggressive, a perception that tended to decrease in later years of residency.

DISCUSSION

Abuses in power relations, rigid hierarchical positions and offensive clinical interactions may foster restrictive environments. In such settings, the reproduction of socio-culturally learned violence is feasible; however, asymmetrical relationships may be deconstructed and transformed.

The Psychology of Athletic Endeavor

A considerable amount of human behavior occurs within the context of sports. In recent years there have been notable advances in psychological science research applied to understanding athletic endeavor. This work has utilized a number of novel theoretical, methodological, and data analytic approaches. We review the current evidence related to developmental considerations, intrapersonal athlete factors, group processes, and the role of the coach in explaining how athletes function within the sport domain. This body of work sheds light on the diverse ways in which psychological processes contribute to athletic strivings. It also has the potential to spark interest in domains of psychology concerned with achievement as well as to encourage cross-domain fertilization of ideas.

Flat teams drive scientific innovation

With teams growing in all areas of scientific and scholarly research, we explore the relationship between team structure and the character of knowledge they produce. Drawing on 89,575 self-reports of team member research activity underlying scientific publications, we show how individual activities cohere into broad roles of 1) leadership through the direction and presentation of research and 2) support through data collection, analysis, and discussion. The hidden hierarchy of a scientific team is characterized by its lead (or L) ratio of members playing leadership roles to total team size. The L ratio is validated through correlation with imputed contributions to the specific paper and to science as a whole, which we use to effectively extrapolate the L ratio for 16,397,750 papers where roles are not explicit. We find that, relative to flat, egalitarian teams, tall, hierarchical teams produce less novelty and more often develop existing ideas, increase productivity for those on top and decrease it for those beneath, and increase short-term citations but decrease long-term influence. These effects hold within person—the same person on the same-sized team produces science much more likely to disruptively innovate if they work on a flat, high-L-ratio team. These results suggest the critical role flat teams play for sustainable scientific advance and the training and advancement of scientists.

Factors associated with medical students speaking-up about medical errors: A cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND

Training medical students to speak up when they witness a potential error is an important competency for patient safety, but details regarding the barriers that prevent medical students from effectively communicating are lacking. Therefore, this study aimed at exploring the factors affecting medical students' willingness to speak up for patient safety when a medical error was observed.

METHODS

This is a cross-sectional study at a medical university in Taiwan, and 151 medical students in clinical clerkship completed a survey including demographic characteristics, conflict of interests/social relationship, personal capability, and personality and characteristics of senior staff domains. Data were analyzed using t-test.

RESULTS

Three of five items in the conflict of interests/social relationship domain showed statistically significant importance, including 'I am afraid of being punished' (Mean difference, MD = 0.37; p < 0.01), 'I do not want to break unspoken rules' (MD = 0.55; p < 0.01), and 'I do not want to have bad team relationship' (MD = 0.58; p < 0.01). Two items (perception of knowledge/understanding and communication skills) in the personal capability domain were significantly important to speaking up. Six of 10 items in personality and characteristics of senior staff domain were rated significantly important in deciding to speak up. The top three factors of them were senior personnel with 'Grumpy' personality (MD = 1.20; p < 0.01), 'hierarchy gap' (MD = 1.12; p < 0.01), and senior personnel with 'Stubborn' personality (MD = 1.06; p < 0.01).

CONCLUSION

Our findings demonstrated medical students' perspectives on barriers to speaking up in the event of medical error. Some factors related to characteristics of senior staff could compromise medical students' ability to speak up in the event of medical error. These results might be important for medical educators in designing personalized educational activities related to medical students' ability to speak up for patient safety.

A Tale of Two Hierarchies: Interactive Effects of Power Differentiation and Status Differentiation on Team Performance

Scholars have long wrestled with whether hierarchical differentiation is functional or dysfunctional for teams. Building on emerging research that emphasizes the distinction between power (i.e., control over resources) and status (i.e., respect from others), we aim to help reconcile the functional and dysfunctional accounts of hierarchy by examining the effects of power differentiation on team performance, contingent on status differentiation. We theorize that power differentiation is dysfunctional for teams with high status differentiation by increasing knowledge hiding, which undermines team performance. In contrast, we predict that power differentiation is functional for teams with low status differentiation by decreasing knowledge hiding, which improves team performance. In a field study, we found that power differentiation harmed team performance via knowledge hiding in teams with high status differentiation, but power differentiation had no effect on knowledge hiding or performance in teams with low status differentiation. In an experiment, we again found that power differentiation harmed team performance by increasing knowledge hiding in teams with high status differentiation. However, power differentiation improved team performance by decreasing knowledge hiding in teams with status equality. Finally, in a third study, we confirm the role of status differentiation in making team climates more competitive and examine the effect of power-status alignment within teams, finding that misalignment exacerbates the dysfunctional effects of power differentiation in teams with high status differentiation. By examining how power and status hierarchies operate in tandem, this work underscores the need to take a more nuanced approach to studying hierarchy in teams.

Formal Hierarchy As a Source of Upward Status Disagreement? A Theoretical Perspective

Formal hierarchies may be presumed to reduce uncertainty about the status ordering of employees as they imply a consistent global ranking. However, formal hierarchies in organizations are not merely linear, but are characterized by branching and nesting (i.e., they comprise subunits within the organization and subunits within other subunits), which creates a local ranking of individuals within each subunit. This can create tension between global and local formal ranks as status cues. Moreover, individuals may also draw on informal status cues that are inconsistent with formal ranks. Consequently, organizational members may experience upward status disagreement (USD), whereby each assumes they have higher status than the other. We offer a theoretical model that identifies important conditions under which cues arising from the structure of the formal hierarchy—either on their own or in conjunction with informal status cues—can be a source of USD. We also explore when USD can result in status conflict and identify moderators of this relationship. Our research has implications for how the frequency of USD can be mitigated as organizational structures become more complex and the workforce becomes increasingly diverse.

Power asymmetry, egalitarianism and team learning – part II: empirical examination of the moderating role of environmental hardship

Purpose

This paper aims to clarify under which conditions, and via what mechanisms, power asymmetry is likely to affect team learning. This work is part of a two-paper series. Part I presents the theoretical arguments linking power asymmetry to team learning via egalitarianism and the moderating role of environmental hardship. In Part II, the authors provide an empirical evaluation of the conceptual model presented in Part I.

Design/methodology/approach

Data was gathered on 4,637 military personnel nested in 143 ongoing teams. Multiple regression analysis was used to analyze the proposed moderated mediation model. The results show that under higher levels of environmental hardship, teams with higher power asymmetry (greater hierarchy) show greater team egalitarianism and higher team learning.

Findings

The results show that under higher levels of environmental hardship, teams with higher power asymmetry (greater hierarchy) show greater team egalitarianism and higher team learning.

Research limitations/implications

The empirical examination of the proposed relationships is based on a large sample of military teams in the real world. Future research would benefit from testing the model on different samples across industries and adopting different operationalizations for environmental hardship relevant to each industry.

Originality/value

This work provides insights to help practitioners to preserve the coordination benefits of hierarchy, while still promoting more egalitarianism and team learning in hierarchical teams.

Consequences of Medical Hierarchy on Medical Students, Residents, and Medical Education in Otolaryngology

Objective

To (1) review concepts of medical hierarchy; (2) examine the role of medical hierarchy in medical education and resident training; (3) discuss potential negative impacts of dysfunctional hierarchy in medical and surgical training programs, focusing on otolaryngology; and (4) investigate solutions to these issues.

Data Sources

Ovid Medline, Embase, GoogleScholar, JSTOR, Google, and article reference lists.

Review Methods

A literature search was performed to identify articles relating to the objectives of the study using the aforementioned data sources, with subsequent exclusion of articles believed to be outside the scope of the current work. The search was limited to the past 5 years.

Conclusions

Two types of hierarchies exist: “functional” and “dysfunctional.” While functional medical hierarchies aim to optimize patient care through clinical instruction, dysfunctional hierarchies have been linked to negative impacts by creating learning environments that discourage the voicing of concerns, legitimize trainee mistreatment, and create moral distress through ethical dilemmas. Such an environment endangers patient safety, undermines physician empathy, hampers learning, lowers training satisfaction, and amplifies stress, fatigue, and burnout. On the other hand, functional hierarchies may improve resident education and well-being, as well as patient safety.

Implications for Practice

Otolaryngology–head and neck surgery programs ought to work toward creating healthy systems of hierarchy that emphasize collaboration and improvement of workplace climate for trainees and faculty. The goal should be to identify aspects of dysfunctional hierarchy in one’s own environment with the ambition of rebuilding a functional hierarchy where learning, personal health, and patient safety are optimized.

Board Power Hierarchy, Corporate Mission, and Green Performance

Green governance is the only way to build a community for humankind with a shared future. Existing research has concentrated more on the macro level rather than the micro level of green governance—the power hierarchy of the governance subjects and its influence on decision-making and the implementation of green governance. The board of directors is the main green governance body, and the consciousness and conducts of the green governance of board members are determined by corporate mission. As a result, we explored the mechanism of the impact of board power hierarchy on green governance performance through the influence of green governance conduct. To interpret this mechanism, we introduced relational contract theory and conducted an empirical analysis. The results show that board power hierarchy negatively affects green governance conduct. Corporate mission restrains the board power hierarchy’s negative influence on green governance conduct, showing that board power structure has a significantly positive effect on green governance performance through the mediator of green governance conduct. Therefore, the positive role of corporate mission is identified.

Walking the Plank: An Experimental Paradigm to Investigate Safety Voice

The investigation of people raising or withholding safety concerns, termed safety voice, has relied on report-based methodologies, with few experiments. Generalisable findings have been limited because: the behavioural nature of safety voice is rarely operationalised; the reliance on memory and recall has well-established biases; and determining causality requires experimentation. Across three studies, we introduce, evaluate and make available the first experimental paradigm for studying safety voice: the “Walking the plank” paradigm. This paradigm presents participants with an apparent hazard (walking across a weak wooden plank) to elicit safety voice behaviours, and it addresses the methodological shortfalls of report-based methodologies. Study 1 (n = 129) demonstrated that the paradigm can elicit observable safety voice behaviours in a safe, controlled and randomised laboratory environment. Study 2 (n = 69) indicated it is possible to elicit safety silence for a single hazard when safety concerns are assessed and alternative ways to address the hazard are absent. Study 3 (n = 75) revealed that manipulating risk perceptions results in changes to safety voice behaviours. We propose a distinction between two independent dimensions (concerned-unconcerned and voice-silence) which yields a 2 × 2 safety voice typology. Demonstrating the need for experimental investigations of safety voice, the results found a consistent mismatch between self-reported and observed safety voice. The discussion examines insights on conceptualising and operationalising safety voice behaviours in relationship to safety concerns, and suggests new areas for research: replicating empirical studies, understanding the behavioural nature of safety voice, clarifying the personal relevance of physical harm, and integrating safety voice with other harm-prevention behaviours. Our article adds to the conceptual strength of the safety voice literature and provides a methodology and typology for experimentally examining people raising safety concerns.

Leaders in Interdependent Contexts Suppress Nonverbal Assertiveness: A Multilevel Analysis of Japanese University Club Leaders' and Members' Rank Signaling

Previous research has shown that leadership is signaled through nonverbal assertiveness. However, those studies have been mostly conducted in individualistic cultural contexts, such as in the U.S. Here, we suggest that one important strategy for goal attainment in collectivistic cultures is for leaders to self-regulate their behaviors. Thus, contrary to the previous evidence from individualistic cultural contexts, in collectivistic cultural contexts, leaders might suppress nonverbal assertiveness. To test this possibility, we assessed nonverbal behaviors (NVB) of Japanese leaders and members, and how they were evaluated by observers. We recruited Japanese leaders and members of university clubs and video-recorded them while introducing their club. Then, we coded their nonverbal rank signaling behavior. Finally, we asked a new set of naïve observers to watch these video-clips and to judge targets' suitability for being possible club leaders. Results of a multilevel analysis (level 1: individual participants, level 2: clubs) suggested that the more the club culture focused on tasks (rather than relationships), the more likely were leaders (but not members) of those clubs to suppress their nonverbal assertiveness. Naïve observers judged individuals who restrained from emitting nonverbal assertiveness as being more suitable and worthy club leaders. Thus, our findings demonstrate the cultural fit between contextual effects at the collective level (i.e., cultural orientation of a group) and the signaling and perceiving of social ranks at the individual level (i.e., suppression of nonverbal assertiveness). We discuss the importance of studying the cultural fit between the collective reality that people inhabit and people's psychology for future research in cultural psychology.

Social Beliefs and Visual Attention: How the Social Relevance of a Cue Influences Spatial Orienting

We are highly tuned to each other's visual attention. Perceiving the eye or hand movements of another person can influence the timing of a saccade or the reach of our own. However, the explanation for such spatial orienting in interpersonal contexts remains disputed. Is it due to the social appearance of the cue—a hand or an eye—or due to its social relevance—a cue that is connected to another person with attentional and intentional states? We developed an interpersonal version of the Posner spatial cueing paradigm. Participants saw a cue and detected a target at the same or a different location, while interacting with an unseen partner. Participants were led to believe that the cue was either connected to the gaze location of their partner or was generated randomly by a computer (Experiment 1), and that their partner had higher or lower social rank while engaged in the same or a different task (Experiment 2). We found that spatial cue‐target compatibility effects were greater when the cue related to a partner's gaze. This effect was amplified by the partner's social rank, but only when participants believed their partner was engaged in the same task. Taken together, this is strong evidence in support of the idea that spatial orienting is interpersonally attuned to the social relevance of the cue—whether the cue is connected to another person, who this person is, and what this person is doing—and does not exclusively rely on the social appearance of the cue. Visual attention is not only guided by the physical salience of one's environment but also by the mental representation of its social relevance.

Who Represents Our Group? The Effects of Prototype Content on Perceived Status Dispersion and Social Undermining

Group identity may be embodied in more typical or extreme member attributes. The present research suggests that individuals' perceptions of the group identity prototype predict their beliefs about the status hierarchy and, in turn, the prevalence of social undermining behavior. Across four studies using both experimental and field data, we find that perceiving that the group prototype is focused on the ideal rather than the central tendency is associated with greater levels of perceived status dispersion and social undermining, and that perceived status dispersion mediates the relationship between members' perception of the group prototype and social undermining behavior. We also find that social context-specifically, salient group achievement goals elicited by intergroup competition and common ingroup identity-attenuates the effect of ideal prototypes on perceived social undermining. Theoretical implications for the social identity, status, and social undermining literatures are discussed.

Roles and ranks: The importance of hierarchy for group functioning

Baumeister et al. propose that role differentiation is critical for group functioning. We propose that effective groups require rank differentiation in addition to role differentiation. We suggest that rank differentiation supports division of labor by incentivizing group members, satisfying fundamental human needs, and organizing and integrating the contributions of differentiated group members.