Seminar (Dept. of Organization and Human Resources)

Title: Rivalry Psyches Up High-Status Individuals but Psyches Out Low-Status Ones: Evidence from an Online Programming Contest Community

Speaker: Tengjian Zou (School of Management, Zhejiang University)

Time: 14:00 (Wednesday), November 9, 2022

Venue: Room 1008, Mingde Business Building

Language：Chinese/English

ABSTRACT：

The view that rivalry, a subjective competitive relationship that an actor has with another actor, increases individual performance is widely accepted by both academics and practitioners. Drawing on status theory, we challenge this view and argue that whereas the rivalry-performance link is positive for high-status individuals, it is negative for low-status ones. To test our hypothesis, we examine a large dataset collected from an online programming contest community, leveraging an exogenous arrangement whereby individuals compete with randomly assigned rivals. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that rivalry has opposite performance effects depending on an actor’s status: it increases the performance of high-status individuals, but it decreases it for low-status ones. We contribute to rivalry theory by showing that status is a potent boundary condition for the performance advantages of rivalry.