In Pursuit of Status: Disentangling Status-Seeking Goals, Motives, and Behavior

Prior research suggests that individuals' pursuit of status has mixed consequences. This is, in part, because individuals can choose different behavioral strategies to acquire status. For example, some adopt behaviors that create value, such as working hard and developing relevant expertise. Others adopt behaviors that project value, often through deceptive behaviors such as misrepresenting one's contributions. Current approaches to studying status pursuit have made these different behavioral strategies difficult to detect. In this paper, we explore the possibility that an explanation for this problem lies in the fact that individuals' behavioral choices are a function of both the type of goals they pursue and reasons why they are pursuing them. Using an empirically abductive approach and the theoretical lens of goal content theory, we find that conventional measures of status pursuit subsume both "authentic" and "contingent" goals, and their accompanying intrinsic motives, and are associated with different behavioral strategies. This is an important discovery, as it enables empirical demonstration that the motives associated with contingent—unlike authentic—status goals are strongly associated with value-projecting behavior, and this relationship is enhanced when there are opportunities for public recognition. Overall, our findings offer a new way of explaining and conceptualizing status pursuit.