Research supporting the Matthew effect demonstrates that high‐status actors experience performance benefits due to increased recognition of their work and greater opportunities and resources, but recent research also indicates that high‐status actors face a greater risk of negative performance evaluations. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the status literature by reconciling these findings and ask: To what extent does status influence heterogeneity in performance evaluations? We explore how project leader status affects the performance of innovation projects in the video game industry. We hypothesize that there is an inverted U‐shaped relationship between project leader status and project performance, and a positive relationship between project leader status and performance extremeness (i.e., performance variation). In order to test our hypotheses, we analysed the performance of video game projects and computed the status of project leaders by applying a project affiliation social network analysis. We find that an intermediate level of status – neither too much nor too little – is positively associated with average project performance. We also reveal more extreme performance effects for high‐status leaders: While some achieve superior project performance, others experience significant project failures. We, therefore, provide important theoretical and practical insights regarding how status affects the implementation of innovations. We also discuss the implications of these findings for the literature on middle‐status conformity.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the conditions under which high performers increase team performance. It is hypothesized that the proportion of high performers in a team increases team performance but only up to a certain point, after which the marginal benefit decreases. Moreover, this study also draws on recent research on the interplay between different types of status hierarchies to hypothesize that the negative effects on team performance of having too high a proportion of high performers are weaker in teams where there is greater age diversity among the high performers and stronger in those where there is less age diversity. These hypotheses are tested by analyzing panel data on National Basketball Association (NBA) teams and the analyses provide support for both hypotheses. The study's most important contribution is that it sheds light on how the interplay between multiple status hierarchies may facilitate collaboration between high performers in teams and organizations, allowing them to exhibit very high performance.

We develop a theoretical framework about how the social network of a project leader can introduce bias in project-related decision making in the form of overvaluation. Overvaluation can increase both the likelihood of implementing projects that turn out to be successes or projects that fall below what is expected and thus turn out to be failures. We provide a deeper understanding of the contingencies under which the biasing effects of networks through overvaluation turn out to be more or less beneficial for organizations. More specifically, we theorize that overvaluation is more beneficial in organizations that have a low decision threshold for projects, whereas it can be more detrimental in organizations that have a high decision threshold.

No abstract

No abstract