Antecedents of Status Attainment in Organizational Settings: Competence as a Mediator

We investigated relations between potential status antecedents and status attainment in an integrative model. We also examined whether (a) competence mediates the status antecedents – the status attainment link, and (b) previously-argued indicators of status hold their effects constant in an integrative model with the field data. This study tested our hypotheses using a round-robin design with longitudinal data collected from 282 employees and 55 teams in various industries. Results indicate that positive emotion and helping behavior make statistically significant and positive contributions to an individual’s status attainment. On the other hand, negative emotion shows negative effect on one’s status achievement. As expected, competence mediates the shown relationships of positive emotion, negative emotion, and helping behavior with status, but not perceived dominance. In fact, with the presence of perceived competence, the effect of dominance, which is initially positively associated with competence, is reversed as negative to status attainment. Our findings offer an empirical demonstration of the underlying mechanisms of status attainment of team members in organizations in an integrative model.