Achieving Social Influence Across Gender and Time: Are Dominance and Prestige Equally Viable of Men & Women?

By Hemant Kakkar
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | April 2024

Citation

Kakkar, Hemant. Achieving Social Influence Across Gender and Time: Are Dominance and Prestige Equally Viable of Men & Women? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology .

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2024

Abstract

The dual framework of social rank allocation discusses dominance and prestige as two viable routes to status or social influence. In doing so, this literature has largely neglected findings demonstrating backlash against men and women for behaving in gender-incongruent ways. Likewise, it remains unclear if dominance and prestige continue to be effective means to status over time. This study investigates the viability of dominance or prestige in contributing to an individual’s social influence, conditional on their gender and across time. Using a stereotype-neutral context of an online social network, I unobtrusively tracked individuals’ changes in social influence among their network members on Twitter. By analyzing almost 230,000 tweets, it was found that men’s influence increased with greater dominance, whereas women’s decreased. At the same time, women’s influence increased with greater prestige, whereas men’s decreased. Network centrality (in-degree centrality) explained this differential interaction pattern. Additionally, longitudinal analysis provided a more nuanced understanding. Over time, role incongruence effects dampened, dominance became less effective, even for men, and prestige became viable for both men and women. Thus, by jointly considering the role of gender and time, this research offers key theoretical caveats to the dual rank framework.

Hemant Kakkar is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Prior to this, he served as an Assistant and Associate (untenured) Professor of Management and Organisations at the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He received his doctoral degree in Organisational Behaviour from London Business School.
His research draws on social psychology and evolutionary theories of status and influence to examine judgments and behaviours of individuals and groups within social hierarchies. He also examines individuals' tendencies to engage in both positive and negative deviant behaviours.

He was awarded the 2021 Alvah H. Chapman Jr. Outstanding Dissertation Award, as well as, the Outstanding Dissertation Award 2021 by the International Association of Conflict Management. His research has also won Best Conference Paper awards from the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management (2021) and the International Association of Conflict Management (2021).

His research is published in leading academic journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Applied Psychology, Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. His research has also been featured in several popular media outlets, such as The Washington Post, Forbes, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Times UK, and the Harvard Business Review.

At ISB, Professor Kakkar teaches the core course in Organisational Behaviour.  He has also taught Foundations of Organisational Behaviour to postgraduate students and graduate-level seminar courses at the Fuqua School of Business. In 2021, he received the Award for Excellence in Teaching for the MMS program. Before joining academia, he worked as a Technical Consultant at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., India.

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