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Personality and Status Attainment: A Micropolitics Perspective

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The Psychology of Social Status

Abstract

In the current chapter, we review research on personality and status attainment. We find that extraversion, trait dominance, neuroticism, and self-monitoring consistently predict status attainment across diverse contexts. Conscientiousness and narcissism can also facilitate status attainment, but their effects appear to be more context dependent. Some evidence suggested openness to experience could predict status, though this evidence was somewhat weaker. Agreeableness was found not to predict status attainment. To explain these findings, we use a recently proposed Micropolitics theory of status-organizing processes (Anderson and Kennedy, Research on managing groups and teams, Vol. 15, pp. 49–80, 2012), which argues that an individual’s status is a product of both a group’s judgments of which individuals deserve higher status, and of the individual’s motivation and ability to seek higher status. That is, individuals jockey for status by striving to enhance their value to the group in the eyes of others.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, USA

    Cameron Anderson & Jon Cowan

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  1. Cameron Anderson
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Correspondence to Cameron Anderson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

    Joey T. Cheng

  2. Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Jessica L. Tracy

  3. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

    Cameron Anderson

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Anderson, C., Cowan, J. (2014). Personality and Status Attainment: A Micropolitics Perspective. In: Cheng, J., Tracy, J., Anderson, C. (eds) The Psychology of Social Status. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0867-7_5

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