Group Status as Multilevel Phenomenon

Introduction

Status is a foundational construct in the study of groups and organizations, operating across multiple levels of analysis. Individuals occupy positions within organizational hierarchies (Gould, 2002; Magee & Galinsky, 2008), groups, teams, and units vary in standing within organizations (Chen et al., 2012), and groups differ in status within broader social hierarchies (e.g., Ridgeway, 2019). Although several scholars acknowledge the multilevel nature of status (Piazza & Castellucci, 2014; Prato et al., 2024), the implications for theory and method remain underdeveloped. Scholars studying groups are in a particularly good position to address this challenge. To aid this effort, we outline three contexts in which embracing a multilevel perspective can meaningfully advance theory and research – when status ratings are obtained from multiple observers, when individual member status ratings are used to compose group status perceptions or hierarchies, and when status changes dynamically over time.

Status Ratings as Multilevel Phenomena: (Dis)Agreement, Legitimacy, and Acuity

Status is commonly defined as the perceived respect and admiration conferred on an entity by others, making it inherently social and relational rather than an objective attribute of individuals or groups (Blader & Yu, 2017; Xu et al., 2024). Reflecting this relational view, researchers typically measure status using ratings from multiple observers (e.g., peers in a round robin design, supervisors, subjective matter experts) and aggregate these ratings when inter-rater agreement is sufficiently high (e.g., Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Anderson et al., 2001). When agreement is strong, status is treated as an emergent property of the target, with ratings nested within the entity being evaluated. This practice assumes that disagreements among raters primarily reflect measurement error, with low consensus ratings of a member or group removed from analyses. However, because status is conferred by multiple observers rather than residing in a single objective position, disagreement may instead reflect the distributed and contested nature of status itself (Kilduff et al., 2016).

Viewed through this lens, multiple status ratings of an individual or group constitute a multilevel phenomenon at the measurement level. Variation across raters can signal important social dynamics, including inconsistent endorsement of an entity’s standing (i.e., status legitimacy: Bettencourt et al., 2001; Brandt, 2013), as well as differences in raters’ ability to accurately perceive status (i.e., status acuity; Yu et al., 2023). Adopting a multilevel perspective in this context is not only necessary, but also allows researchers to move beyond treating consensus as a prerequisite for analysis and leverages disagreement as a theoretically informative feature of status in small groups.

From Individual to Group Status: Emergence, Composition, and Cross-Level Effects

The status of individual group members derives its meaning from the broader social hierarchy in which it is embedded (Li et al., 2016). Status perceptions are therefore inherently relative, reflecting not only an individual’s standing but also the configuration of others within the local context – a dynamic captured by classic frog-pond models (Davis, 1966). Accordingly, individual status is defined by one’s position within a differentiated social structure rather than by an absolute level of standing (Yu et al., 2019).

Because status perceptions reflect hierarchical ordering rather than uniform attributes, groups rarely consist of members with equivalent levels of status. Instead, status is dispersed across members and is more or less concentrated across collectives (Bunderson et al., 2016), shaping how group status and other group-level constructs (i.e., group hierarchy; status conflict) should be conceptualized and measured. Consistent with multi-level theory, researchers often rely on consensus or additive aggregation to compose group-level variables from individual reports (Klein & Kozlowski, 2000). However, other compositional approaches – such as referent shift, dispersion, minimum, and maximum models (Chan, 1998) – offer alternatives for aggregating individual-level information and capturing several higher-level status-related concepts. Crucially, these approaches differ in what they conceptualize, measure, and analyze. For example, referent shift measures (“My team members competed for influence”; Chan, 1998) redirect attention from the self to the group and assume a shared perception of within-group dynamics. As such, they are well suited for capturing collective perceptual phenomena such as team status conflict (e.g., Bendersky & Hays, 2012; Schouten et al., 2024), but they do not necessarily reveal how status is distributed within teams. For this, scholars often rely on dispersion models, which capture within-group status differences, hierarchy strength, and/or inequalities (e.g., Hays & Bendersky, 2015; Ridgeway, 2019). Maximum and minimum models offer a different lens by representing the team using the highest-status and lowest-status member, respectively. These models are most conceptually useful when theory implies an “extreme-member” mechanism – that is, when one member is expected to be disproportionately diagnostic or consequential. Framed this way, they may be useful to favorite and underdog theorizing (Pettit et al., 2024), where observers’ expectations about a team’s standing may hinge on salient extremes (e.g., a “star” driving favorite perceptions via a maximum model, or a “weak link” driving underdog perceptions via a minimum model). Despite their promise, these models remain the exception rather than the norm in status research. Across these compositional approaches, group-level status is often constructed from internal member ratings or objective criterion, without directly assessing whether these operationalizations (e.g., dispersion, maximum, minimum, referent-shift) map onto the way external observers actually rank or evaluate groups; future research would benefit from a multi-level approach that explicitly distinguishes – and then links – internal hierarhcy or status perceptions, within-team status distributions, and externally conferred group status.

Employing a multilevel perspective also enables researchers to explore cross-level relationships, such as how higher-level (e.g., group/team, dyad, leader/supervisor) factors influence members’ status. Accordingly, multilevel analytic techniques are essential for modeling the nested structure of small group data (Chen et al., 2005) and can facilitate the examination of theoretically meaningful variation in how hierarchies emerge and evolve (Abi-Esber et al., 2025), through alternative composition models and cross-level relationships.

Status Observations Over Time: Instability, Change, and Trajectories

As a socially constructed phenomenon, status is dynamic and subject to change for both individuals and collectives (Bendersky & Pai, 2018; Pettit & Marr, 2020), with perceptions shifting as individuals’ contributions, relationships, and visibility change, and as groups themselves evolve (Gray et al., 2023; Neeley & Dumas, 2016). When status is measured repeatedly over time, observations are nested within a single entity (e.g., individual, dyad, group), introducing an additional form of non-independence addressed through multilevel modeling (Bliese et al., 2007). At the individual level, temporal change in status can take multiple forms, including shifts in rank or relative position (e.g., Doyle & Lount, 2023; Marr & Thau, 2014), growth or decline trajectories (e.g., Kakkar et al., 2019; Pettit et al., 2022), or transitions between qualitatively and quantitatively distinct status profiles (e.g., Fernandes et al., 2021). At the collective level, changes in membership – for example, losing or gaining one or more members with high versus low status – are likely to affect perceptions of group status and raise important questions about the effects of status change on mobility, group attractiveness, and the “stickiness” of status perceptions (Bunderson et al., 2014; Hinds et al., 2026). For example, groups that arrive at similar status positions through different trajectories (e.g., gradual accumulation versus sudden loss of a high-status member) may be perceived differently despite sharing comparable standing. Incorporating temporal dynamics underscores the value of multilevel approaches for capturing both stability and change in status hierarchies.

Concluding Statement

Status in groups is fundamentally a multilevel concept. Advancing research on status requires theoretical and methodological alignment with this reality in at least three ways: considering variation in status ratings and modeling disagreement across observers, specifying and exploring how member-level status measures combine to form group-level perceptions and hierarchies, and examining how status perceptions evolve dynamically over time for individuals and groups. We hope this essay encourages scholars to more fully embrace a multilevel approach, which is essential for advancing research on status in small groups and beyond.