Informe de Actividades

Social status refers to the prestige, respect, and value bestowed upon individuals and groups based on what is valued in a particular social context (Anderson & Miller, 2003). According to Lin (1999), status attainment is a process whereby individuals utilize and invest in personal and social resources for returns in the form of socioeconomic standing. Status is influenced by both achieved (formal) status (e.g., earned occupational or educational accomplishments) and ascribed (informal) status which refers to value bestowed upon individuals by others that involve perceptions and value judgements (Lin, 1999). In the context of hospital organizations, an employee’s status is influenced by their formal professional status and role within the organization and their reputation,

personality characteristics, and connections with others. While Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998) theory of social capital focused on how formal hierarchical structures within organizations create differential access to social resources (i.e., social capital), in reality social status is a combination of formal and informal status.

Moreover, formal status alone provides an incomplete picture of the social

dynamics within a workplace, as one could have high formal status but not be well-liked, resulting in low social status and limited social capital. Additionally, the formal status hierarchy is not always well-defined among healthcare professionals and not everyone is

part of the formal organizational structure. For instance, in Ontario physicians are

independent contractors granted hospital privileges (Ontario Hospital Association, 2014); they are not employees of the hospital. On paper this puts them outside of the

organizational hierarchy but they are still an important part of the hospital and of nurses’ workplace social network. They are also high-status individuals within the hospital because of the value patients, administrators, and other members of the healthcare team confer upon them due to their occupation, expertise, and scope of practice. Given the terms of employment of physicians and the lack of hierarchical structure for many healthcare employees, it makes sense to define status in the current study as subjective status which includes both informal and formal status.

Status is a key component of structural social capital that results in social stratification (Lamertz & Aquino, 2004). According to Lin’s (1999) social resources theory, social strata form the shape of a pyramid, with few high-status individuals at the top and masses of low-status individuals at the bottom. This is congruent with the view that social status is a type of membership card held by a few elite members of society to the disadvantage of everyone else (Adler & Kwon, 2002; Coleman, 1988; Kawachi, Kennedy, Lochner, & Prothrow-Stith, 1997). Not surprisingly, research about the role of social status within organizations has largely focused on the influence of individuals’ social capital on career success or compensation. For example, Belliveau et al. (1996) showed that social status influences CEO compensation, with higher status individuals earning more than those with lower status. Anderson and Miller (2003) also found that individuals’ socio-economic status was an influential determinant of future social capital

and entrepreneurial success. This may be due to the tendency for people to be attracted to or identify with similar others (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001; Tajfal, 1978) which would result in high status individuals having access to greater resources through their relationships with other high status people, further perpetuating their high status.

Status, then, can be acquired by obtaining socially valued credentials (such as degrees or professional designations) and/or by associating with others who have high status or prestige within a particular group. This is supported by the work of Bonacich (1987) who proposed that an individual’s status within a social network depends on the status of the people they are connected to and therefore should be measured using an equation accounting for the relative status of each alter in an ego’s network.

Social status can be thought of as a valuable social resource that can be acquired in part by associating with valued others. That is, by virtue of having access to high status individuals within one’s network, nurses themselves obtain status at work, providing them with power to access and mobilize social resources and to influence others (Lin, 1999). High status actors are also more likely to engage in valuable role interactions with others in their organization (Lamertz & Aquino, 2004), positioning themselves as a valuable actor within the network. Thus, nurses with higher status are likely to have greater social capital by virtue of their status location within their social network at work.

The current study operationalizes network status as the subjective social status an individual feels they have at work rather than the average hierarchical (formal) status of their network contacts which was used by Gianvito (2007). Kanter’s (1977, 1993) notion of informal power within organizations describes how personal alliances and connections

with others at work provide employees with access to working conditions that empower them to accomplish their job effectively. While informal power and social status are not identical concepts, they go hand in hand. That is, employees with high social status often have high levels of informal power as a result of their social position and respect from others. In this way, informal power is a good indicator of social status in the workplace, thus it makes sense to adapt items from the informal power subscale of Chandler’s (1991) Conditions of Work Effectiveness Questionnaire (CWEQ) to measure social status.