U. of Michigan, Ross School of Business, United States
In an increasingly complex organizational world, the design of team structures, in terms of both employee rank and role, plays a crucial role in the wellbeing of teams. Hierarchical teams, where members are vertically differentiated in rank, have been previously argued to provide emotional comfort to team members, but these findings primarily come from situations where team members do not actively interact. In this paper, we explore whether members of a vertically differentiated team that interdependently collaborate towards a common goal may experience more emotional exhaustion than comfort, as team interactions may elicit negative rank-based social comparison and affective processes, which subsequently harm team performance. Additionally, we investigate how to neutralize this effect - when vertical differentiation is paired with horizontal differentiation, where team members hold unique functional roles, hierarchical teams are less likely to experience emotional exhaustion and subsequently lower team performance, as purely rank-based social comparisons are reduced. We find support for our model across two studies: a large-scale group lab experiment and a field study of teams in a large national fitness chain. Our findings integrate social comparison theory with the work on social hierarchy in teams to understand the emotional toll these structures may pose for interdependent task teams, unless simultaneously paired with role-based differentiation.
