Achieving a promotion or some other boost to our status seems like a good thing and something we would generally cherish in the workplace, but a recent study suggests that we only receive a boost from this gain in status if we feel that it’s deserved.

The study followed a group of American employees at a Japanese company.  None of the group were in high status roles, until that is, the company began to adopt English as its official language.  At that point, their non-English speaking colleagues suddenly bestowed them with significantly more respect.

Whilst this afforded them a short-term boost to their morale, the misgivings  about their seemingly underserved ‘promotion’ gradually ate away at them.

“It wasn’t all positive. It was very obvious that the American employees knew that they lucked into this change of status and were very aware that the status boost was not tied to their performance or achievement,” the authors say.

“They had a feeling that their good luck was unstable – that another new policy could reverse their good fortune.”

 The dynamic nature of status

It’s tempting to think of status as something you either have or you don’t, but the study reminds us that it’s a little more nuanced than that.

Employees at the company revealed the shift in their status once their employer made the shift towards English as the defacto language for the company, but it was not without side effects.

Ill-gotten gains

The study revealed that people who gained status in such an undeserved way felt very uneasy about it, both due to the moral implications of their boost, but also in the ease with which the gains could be taken away.

“There was a clear sense of a lack of control,” the authors say. “They couldn’t tie this status boost to something they did. If you earn it, you feel some sense of control and certainty about your new position within the company, but they didn’t have that.”

Interestingly, those who had gained unfairly would often then try and rationalize their gains.  They’d suggest that their rise in status would actually be good for their Japanese peers as they would thus be forced to learn English too.  It’s a clear attempt to try and assuage some of the guilt they felt.

Various applications

Whilst the study was clearly focused on the narrow field of language, but the authors are confident that it has crossover applications to other fields where employees gain for reasons outside of their control.

“Steve Jobs elevated designers at Apple, somewhat at the expense of engineers,” they say. “The work didn’t necessarily change, but suddenly designers saw their value rise at Apple.”

It may even be rather more subtle than that.  For instance, a manager may prefer a particular type of person (introverts for instance), and this preference awards status to particular types of employee.

The authors suggest that managers give some thought to how changes such as this may influence how people work collectively and that boosts to status may not be as beneficial as one would assume.