Amy M. Christie

Disentangling the Indirect Links Between Socioeconomic Status and Health: The Dynamic Roles of Work Stressors and Personal Control

Prior research has documented an indirect link between socioeconomic status (SES) and health, and the goal in this study was to help unravel this phenomenon from a dynamic perspective. The authors hypothesized that SES would be positively related to feelings of personal control and negatively related to perceived work stressors. Drawing on dynamic conceptualizations of these psychosocial factors, they suggest that these psychosocial factors relate to one another over time. Individuals who have higher levels of personal control experience increasingly fewer work stressors over time than do those with lower levels of personal control, and those who experience greater work stressors increasingly perceive less personal control over time than do those with fewer work stressors. Finally, the authors argue that trajectories of personal control and work stressors are associated with the accumulation of health problems over the same period. Their model was tested with 3-wave data (over 4 years) from a nationally representative sample of Canadian employees (N = 3,419). Latent curve modeling provides support for the proposed dynamic model. Conceptual and practical implications are drawn, and suggestions for future research are outlined.

Beyond status: relating status inequality to performance and health in teams.

Status structures in organizations are ubiquitous yet largely ignored in organizational research. We offer a conceptualization of team status inequality, or the extent to which status positions on a team are dispersed. Status inequality is hypothesized to be negatively related to individual performance and physical health for low-status individuals when uncooperative behavior is high. Trajectories of the outcomes across time are also explored. Analyses using multilevel modeling largely support our hypotheses in a sample of National Basketball Association players across six time points from 2000 to 2005.

Narcissistic Reactions to Subordinate Role Assignment: The Case of the Narcissistic Follower

Narcissists aspire to be leaders and consequently may react negatively to being assigned a subordinate role, even though such roles may be integral to group functioning. In the first three studies, participants were assigned to a low status role (i.e., “employee”), high status role (i.e., “project manager”), or (in Studies 2 and 3) control condition. More narcissistic participants were less satisfied and discredited the role assignment more in the employee condition than in the project manager condition. Furthermore, more narcissistic participants displayed greater self-interest in the employee condition, relative to the project manager condition (Study 2), and less willingness to engage in behaviors to benefit the group in the employee condition, relative to the project manager and control conditions (Study 3). In Study 4, these findings were replicated in sports teams. Although there is nothing inherently negative about subordinate roles, narcissists perceive them negatively and react poorly to occupying them.