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. leia todo o artigo
