How does status affect performance and learning from failure? Evidence from online communities

• Main Author: ZOU, Tengjian
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Status; hierarchy; team; learning; failure; online community; Strategic Management Policy; Technology and Innovation
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/262; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1262&context=etd_coll
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This dissertation is composed of two essays. In the first essay, I investigate the factors that can alleviate the detrimental effect of hierarchy on team performance. I first show that hierarchy negatively impacts team performance, which is consistent with recent meta-analytic evidence. One mechanism that drives this negative effect is that hierarchy prevents low-ranking members from voicing their potentially valuable insights. Then I propose that team familiarity is one factor that can encourage low-ranking team members to speak up. I contend that team familiarity can be established either by team members’ prior experience in working with one another or can be built by team members’ prior experience in working in hierarchical teams, such that they are familiar with hierarchical working relationships. Using data collected from an online crowdsourcing contest community, I find that team members’ familiarity with each other and their familiarity with hierarchical working relationships can alleviate the detrimental effect of hierarchy on team performance. By illuminating the moderating effect of team familiarity on the hierarchy-performance relationship, this study advances current understandings of how to reduce the detrimental effect of hierarchy on performance, and offers insights about how teams should be organized to improve performance. In the second essay, I examine what factors drive learning from failure. In answering this question, I bring status theory into the literature on learning from failure and propose that status can drive people’s learning from their failures. I propose that failure feedback given by a higher-status source is more likely to drive a focal individual to learn from her failures than failure feedback given by a lower-status source. This is because people pay more attention to and are more engaged with failure feedback given by a higher-status source than failure feedback given by a lower-status source. Data collected from an online programming contest community provides support to my prediction that failure feedback given by higher-status peers has stronger effect in driving learning from failure than failure feedback given by lower-status peers. By demonstrating that status is a driver of learning from failure, I expand experiential learning theories by incorporating status theory.