Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, China
The literature on workplace status often assumes higher status leads to favorable outcomes, overlooking the subjectivity of status perceptions. An individual’s status may be perceived differently by themselves and others, making the alignment or misalignment between self-perceived and other-perceived status critical, especially during newcomer socialization. Drawing on expectation states theory and self-other agreement (SOA) research with newcomer socialization, we examine how the (dis)agreement between newcomers’ self-perception of status and their leaders’ perception of newcomer status impacts key socialization outcomes. Using longitudinal data collected across four time points from 240 newcomer-leader dyads, we find that task mastery is higher when newcomers’ self-perception of status matches leaders’ perceptions at a high level compared to a low level. Additionally, newcomers who underestimate their status demonstrate higher task mastery and organizational identification than those who overestimate.
