Sociometric Status and Peer Control Attempts: A Multiple Status Hierarchies Approach

• Author: Ed Sleebos,Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca,Maurits C. de Klepper,Filip Agneessens
• Published date: 01 January 2017
• Date: 01 January 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12242

Sociometric Status and Peer Control Attempts: A

Multiple Status Hierarchies Approach

Maurits C. de Klepper, Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca,

Ed Sleebos and Filip Agneessens

Amsterdam University College; University of Kentucky; VU Amsterdam; University of Surrey

ABSTRACT We study a population of first year midshipmen within an elite military academy to

explore the relationship between individuals’ sociometric status (e.g., status conferrals based on

positive interpersonal affect and perceived competence, and status degradations based on

negative interpersonal affect) and their attempts to directly control their peers’ behaviour over

a year’s time. Results show that multiple informal sociometric status hierarchies develop early

in the organization’s life and remain remarkably stable. Control attempts are driven by these

status hierarchies: Lower competence status individuals and those who attract negative status

degradations are targeted for control by more people early in the group’s life, those relatively

free of negative status degradations attempt to control greater numbers of others throughout

the group’s existence, while higher positive status is generally unrelated to control attempts.

However, control attempts do not lead to higher future sociometric status, suggesting they are

not status signals. Findings also show that individuals targeted for control by many others

leave the organization entirely.

Keywords: informal peer control attempts, organizational control theory, positive and

negative ties, social network analysis, sociometric status, turnover

A fundamental issue in any group or organization is defining and enforcing the accepta-

ble behaviours that promote the objectives and continuing healthy functioning of the

organization and its members. The struggle within organizational status hierarchies

between higher- and lower-level members to define and direct members’ attention and

behaviours is the focus for control theory (e.g., Braverman, 1974; Clegg, 1981; Clegg &

Dunkerley, 1980; Sitkin et al., 2010). Control theory highlights that this struggle can be

resolved through many types of behavioural control, including bureaucratic control,

which emphasizes directing lower level members’ actions through surveillance and eval-

uation by managers whose status is rooted in the organization’s formal hierarchy. How-

ever, the effectiveness of controlling behaviour via these bureaucratic principles is

Address for reprints: Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca, Gatton Chaired Professor of Management, Gatton College of

Business & Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA (joelabianca@gmail.com)

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C2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 54:1 January 2017

doi: 10.1111/joms.12242

diminished in knowledge-intensive organizations (Turner and Makhija, 2006). Many

professional, knowledge-based organizations instead increasingly rely on decentralized

and self-managing modes of organizing, encouraging, and enforcing behaviour based

on informal peer control (Alvesson, 1990; De Jong et al., 2014; Manz and Sims, 1993).

This shift in the locus of control from the upper echelons of the formal organization

hierarchy to the lower-level members themselves is referred to alternatively as concertive

control, clan control, lateral control, or more recently as informal peer control (e.g.,

Barker, 1993; Kirsch, 1997, 2004; Lazega, 2000; Loughry, 2010; Ouchi, 1979; Tomp-

kins and Cheney, 1985). The basis for peer control revolves around value-consensus and

norm enforcement among these organizational members as opposed to strict adherence

to the values and rules imposed by management or owners (Barley and Kunda, 2001;

Sewell, 1998). Rather than monitor employee behaviours by relying on a small set of

managers whose monitoring gaze is often obscured by large spans of control and the

need to perform other duties, peer control systems allow every colleague to become a

potential controller (De Jong et al., 2014).

The question that then emerges is whether informal peer control is an egalitarian pro-

cess, one in which all members share equally in monitoring and controlling each other’s

behaviour, or is instead one in which the organization’s formal status hierarchy is par-

tially or fully replaced with an informal status hierarchy that encourages some individu-

als to assert their view of acceptable behaviour over others. While the general tendency

within control theory is to suggest that peer control is an egalitarian process (Johnson,

2011), we will instead argue that while each individual can, in theory, attempt to control

others’ behaviour within an informal peer control system, in practice each member’s

attempts to control others are limited by that person’s sociometric status within the

group. Sociometric status is the individual’s relative social standing and is driven by the

two universal dimensions of interpersonal cognition (Fiske et al., 2007) – their relative

competence as perceived by their peers (Magee & Galinsky, 2008), and their warmth, or

how liked and disliked they are (Carboni and Casciaro, 2016; Peery, 1979).

Our contribution to control theory is understanding better whether an individual’s

position in the organization’s informal sociometric status hierarchy determines the num-

ber of other organizational members whom they will attempt to informally control,

while taking into account that the reverse might also be true – i.e., that the degree to

which an individual attempts to control others, or is targeted by others for control,

might affect the individual’s status within the group over time. Our work illuminates

whether these control attempts reinforce existing social hierarchies or are attempts that

contest and change individuals’ relative dominance within the organization (e.g., Bend-

ersky and Hays, 2012; Bothner et al., 2012; Strauss et al., 1963).

We study these dynamics over a year-long period within an elite military academy

where previously unacquainted recruits develop a de novo social hierarchy and attempt to

control each other’s behaviour in a setting with little formally-imposed organizational

structural hierarchy. We will show that an informal status hierarchy develops early in

the organization’s life span and that higher sociometric status determines control

attempts but that there is no evidence for the reverse – i.e., that control attempts are not

being used as signals or dominance displays to increase status over time. We further

show that there are multiple status hierarchies in the group and that negative status

2 M. C. de Klepper et al.

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C2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies