When individuals attend to their relative standing or status within a particular group or organization, the relevant dimension of status might be pay in one organization, authority level in a second, and technical expertise in a third.
The factors that produce status obviously vary among groups of employees and across occupations, organizational contexts, and countries.
Yet although money (or authority, or expertise) may be the dominant dimension in a given situation, other dimensions cannot be completely ignored, particularly because studies have shown that people are also attentive to the degree of consistency in their statuses across multiple dimensions and across multiple social contexts.
Sometimes an individual occupies high status along one dimension and low status along another.
Examples include: the highly compensated salesperson with only a seventh-grade education; the senior executive who is much younger than her subordinates; the task-force leader from Marketing in an Engineering-dominated organization; or the non-physician hospital administrator.
This sort of status inconsistency can create an incongruity that has been shown to promote various undesirable outcomes.
People who occupy wildly different status positions on different social hierarchies face confusion over how they should act and how they should expect to be treated by others.
This confusion creates ambiguity and strain, sometimes producing nontrivial psychological (and even medical) maladies.
Accordingly, organizations must be sensitive to what can happen when an individual changes status on one dimension but stays at the same status or loses status on another dimension - for instance, the rapidly promoted superstar whose organizational rank is soon incommensurate with her age or tenure.
Moreover, because we occupy many different statuses, including ones derived from activities outside of work, there are abundant opportunities for inconsistency between organizational status and social status.
The literature on the adverse effects of status inconsistency implies that organizations should try to alleviate or mitigate such inconsistencies as well.
There are "switching costs" associated with making changes in any kind of transaction, such as sourcing components with a new supplier, taking your business to a new law firm, or relocating your physical plant.
These costs arise because you (and members of your firm) must learn new routines and reconstruct networks of connections.
To alter its human resources management practices or premises-either by replacing workers or transforming personnel policies - the employer faces these generic switching costs.
In addition, however, changing human resources management philosophies, policies, and procedures entails another switching cost that is perhaps less tangible yet no less important: what we might call "Legitimation costs.
" Much of what makes human resources management function smoothly involves employment practices that are traditional, customary, and unquestioned or taken for granted by employees.
Dramatic changes in human resources practices require that the old order be renegotiated and legitimated anew.
For example, early students of labor relations argued that much of the benefit of long-term employment, promotion from within, and the other characteristic features of internal labor markets, such as pegging pay to jobs rather than to individuals, had to do with the legitimacy associated with these practices.
Analogies were made between modern-day internal labor markets - which tied employees to an organization essentially for life-and feudalism, where the sense of mutual obligation among lords, vassals, and serfs and well-entrenched customs ensured that relationships persisted smoothly and harmoniously across generations.
Over time within an internal labor market, it has been argued, a similar set of customs and rules develops that provides an invaluable form of social glue within the workplace.
If the organization's job structure or reward system or performance appraisal system were to change on a daily basis, it is hard to believe that employees would ever view them as legitimate, much less take them for granted.
The rub, of course, is that the very properties that tend to foster trust and legitimacy in an organization's human resources system tend to make that same system resistant to change, a reality with which many prominent companies have grappled in recent years.
The factors that produce status obviously vary among groups of employees and across occupations, organizational contexts, and countries.
Yet although money (or authority, or expertise) may be the dominant dimension in a given situation, other dimensions cannot be completely ignored, particularly because studies have shown that people are also attentive to the degree of consistency in their statuses across multiple dimensions and across multiple social contexts.
Sometimes an individual occupies high status along one dimension and low status along another.
Examples include: the highly compensated salesperson with only a seventh-grade education; the senior executive who is much younger than her subordinates; the task-force leader from Marketing in an Engineering-dominated organization; or the non-physician hospital administrator.
This sort of status inconsistency can create an incongruity that has been shown to promote various undesirable outcomes.
People who occupy wildly different status positions on different social hierarchies face confusion over how they should act and how they should expect to be treated by others.
This confusion creates ambiguity and strain, sometimes producing nontrivial psychological (and even medical) maladies.
Accordingly, organizations must be sensitive to what can happen when an individual changes status on one dimension but stays at the same status or loses status on another dimension - for instance, the rapidly promoted superstar whose organizational rank is soon incommensurate with her age or tenure.
Moreover, because we occupy many different statuses, including ones derived from activities outside of work, there are abundant opportunities for inconsistency between organizational status and social status.
The literature on the adverse effects of status inconsistency implies that organizations should try to alleviate or mitigate such inconsistencies as well.
There are "switching costs" associated with making changes in any kind of transaction, such as sourcing components with a new supplier, taking your business to a new law firm, or relocating your physical plant.
These costs arise because you (and members of your firm) must learn new routines and reconstruct networks of connections.
To alter its human resources management practices or premises-either by replacing workers or transforming personnel policies - the employer faces these generic switching costs.
In addition, however, changing human resources management philosophies, policies, and procedures entails another switching cost that is perhaps less tangible yet no less important: what we might call "Legitimation costs.
" Much of what makes human resources management function smoothly involves employment practices that are traditional, customary, and unquestioned or taken for granted by employees.
Dramatic changes in human resources practices require that the old order be renegotiated and legitimated anew.
For example, early students of labor relations argued that much of the benefit of long-term employment, promotion from within, and the other characteristic features of internal labor markets, such as pegging pay to jobs rather than to individuals, had to do with the legitimacy associated with these practices.
Analogies were made between modern-day internal labor markets - which tied employees to an organization essentially for life-and feudalism, where the sense of mutual obligation among lords, vassals, and serfs and well-entrenched customs ensured that relationships persisted smoothly and harmoniously across generations.
Over time within an internal labor market, it has been argued, a similar set of customs and rules develops that provides an invaluable form of social glue within the workplace.
If the organization's job structure or reward system or performance appraisal system were to change on a daily basis, it is hard to believe that employees would ever view them as legitimate, much less take them for granted.
The rub, of course, is that the very properties that tend to foster trust and legitimacy in an organization's human resources system tend to make that same system resistant to change, a reality with which many prominent companies have grappled in recent years.
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