Re-examining dominance as an antecedent of social rank attainment
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Dominant actors—individuals who engage in aggressive behaviors aimed at controlling others—are reliably deferred to, propelling them to positions of status and influence in groups, organizations, and society more broadly. This dissertation considers the potential precarity of dominance as a rank-ascending strategy by considering novel pathways through which dominance succeeds, and fails, to incite submission in others. While the majority of research on dominance and social rank attainment adopts a dyadic level of analysis—that is, it considers a single dominant actor and a single potential submitter—this dissertation widens the lens to consider the entire group context in which dominance attempts often take place. Chapter 1 provides a review of the dominance literature in order to identify sources of conflicting accounts of dominance's effectiveness and highlights potentially critical yet largely untested moderators of the dominance-submission relationship. Chapter 2 highlights the crucial role that others' deference towards dominant actors plays in individuals' own decisions to defer to dominant actors. Finally, Chapter 3 shows that individuals think others respect dominant actors more than they themselves do, and perceptions of others' respect inform individuals' own deference decisions, even after accounting for individuals' own first-order respect for, and fear of, dominant actors. Collectively, this research suggests that dominance is not by default a reliable "path to the top, " but instead is contingent upon a host of moderating factors that have gone largely overlooked in research on dominance's effectiveness, particularly those at the group level.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Reit, Emily Samantha |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Gruenfeld, Deborah H |
| Thesis advisor | Gruenfeld, Deborah H |
| Thesis advisor | Miller, Dale T |
| Thesis advisor | Sorensen, Jesper B, 1967- |
| Degree committee member | Miller, Dale T |
| Degree committee member | Sorensen, Jesper B, 1967- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Business |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Emily S. Reit. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Business. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/wc107dv8673 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Emily Samantha Reit
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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