Pat Satterstrom, DBA
Assistant Professor, New York University
Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
Seeding Change in Social Hierarchy:
How Lower-power Members Gain Influence on Teams[1]
Teams perform best when they harness all members’ ideas, information, and expertise, but social hierarchies often limit the contributions of lower-power members. Drawing on 31 months of observations and interviews with two multi-disciplinary healthcare teams, we present one of the first longitudinal process studies of how social hierarchies can evolve to enable lower-power members to have influence on teams. We show that despite being consciously designed to elicit contributions from all, lower-power members (e.g., medical assistants) on both teams were initially ignored or rejected by higher-power members (e.g., doctors). However, lower-power members on one team, but not the other, eventually gained influence on team decision-making. We show how lower-power members on this team planted the seeds of change by publicly performing proactive work behaviors (specifically, courageous voice and taking charge) that destabilized the team’s social hierarchy toward more distributed influence. We call this the “seeding process” because these behaviors were often immediately rejected or ignored but later took root when their memory was amplified in repetition, recollection by allies, or reflection during crisis. This created cognitive, behavioral, and process changes that fundamentally altered the team’s social hierarchy, enabling lower-power members to gain influence and improving team effectiveness.
[1]This work was supported by The Eric M. Mindich Research Fund for the Foundations of Human Behavior and The Susan G. Cohen Doctoral Research Award in Organizational Design, Effectiveness, and Change.
