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• Working Paper | 2018

  Status Inconsistency: Variance in One's Status Across Groups Harms Well-being but Improves Perspective-taking

  Catarina Fernandes and Alison Wood Brooks

  Most people belong to many different groups. While some people experience consistently high or low status across all of their groups, others experience wildly different levels of status in each group. In this research, we examine how status inconsistency – the degree to which one’s status varies across groups – impacts well-being and perspective-taking. Across five studies, we find robust evidence that status inconsistency (controlling for average status) has negative intrapersonal, but positive interpersonal, consequences. Study 1A shows that higher status inconsistency across many groups is related to lower levels of life satisfaction, self-esteem, and subjective social status. Study 1B tests the causal relationship between status inconsistency and well-being, demonstrating that even thinking about one’s status inconsistency can lead to lower feelings of happiness. Study 2 focuses on attitudes towards the most status-inconsistent groups and shows that individuals are most likely to leave the groups in which their status is furthest away from their mean personal status across groups, irrespective of whether the deviance is positive (much higher status than average) or negative (much lower status than average). Studies 3A and 3B shift to investigate the interpersonal effects of status inconsistency on perspective-taking. Study 3A shows that status inconsistency is related to higher levels of trait perspective-taking and empathetic concern, and Study 3A that thinking about one’s status inconsistency increases perspective-taking on a task. Taken together, the results indicate that those whose status is inconsistent across groups experience lower levels of well-being, but are better at understanding others’ points of view.

  Keywords: Status; Social hierarchies; Groups and Teams; well-being; Perspective Taking; Status and Position; Groups and Teams; Satisfaction; Perspective;

  Citation:

  Fernandes, Catarina, and Alison Wood Brooks. "Status Inconsistency: Variance in One's Status Across Groups Harms Well-being but Improves Perspective-taking." Working Paper, 2018. (under review, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.)  View Details

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• Article | Harvard Business Review | May–June 2018

  The Surprising Power of Questions

  Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John

  Much of an executive’s workday is spent asking others for information—requesting status updates from a team leader, for example, or questioning a counterpart in a tense negotiation. Yet unlike professionals such as litigators, journalists, and doctors, who are taught how to ask questions as an essential part of their training, few executives think of questioning as a skill that can be honed—or consider how their own answers to questions could make conversations more productive.
  That’s a missed opportunity. Questioning is a powerful tool for unlocking value in companies: It spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and better performance, and it builds trust among team members. And it can mitigate business risk by uncovering unforeseen pitfalls and hazards.
  Several techniques can enhance the power and efficacy of queries: Favor follow-up questions, know when to keep questions open ended, get the sequence right, use the right tone, and pay attention to group dynamics.

  Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Communication Strategy; Information; Knowledge Sharing; Performance Effectiveness;

  Citation:

  Brooks, Alison Wood, and Leslie K. John. "The Surprising Power of Questions." Harvard Business Review 96, no. 3 (May–June 2018): 60–67.  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

  Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures

  Karen Huang, Alison Wood Brooks, Ryan W. Buell, Brian Hall and Laura Huang

  People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across two online experiments and an experimental field study, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate others’ feelings of malicious envy: revealing one’s failures. People are reticent to reveal their failures—both as they are happening and after they have occurred. However, in two experiments, we find that revealing successes and the failures encountered on the path to success (compared to revealing only successes) decreases observers’ malicious envy. This effect holds regardless of whether the individual is ambiguously or unambiguously successful. Then, in a field experiment set in an entrepreneurial pitch competition, where pride displays are common and stakes are high, we find suggestive evidence that learning about the failures of a successful entrepreneur decreases observers’ malicious envy, increases their benign envy, decreases their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s hubristic pride (i.e., arrogance), and increases their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s authentic pride (i.e., confidence). These findings align with previous work on the social-functional relation of envy and pride. Taken together, our results highlight how revealing the failures encountered on the way to success can be a counterintuitive yet effective interpersonal emotion regulation strategy.

  Keywords: envy; malicious envy; Emotion Regulation; disclosure; Emotions; Perception; Interpersonal Communication; Communication Strategy;

  Citation:

  Huang, Karen, Alison Wood Brooks, Ryan W. Buell, Brian Hall, and Laura Huang. "Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-080, February 2018.  View Details

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