Middle status conformity in teams: The role of status threat

We examine how individuals’ positions in an informal team power hierarchy shape interpersonal helping, and how hierarchy stability conditions this relationship. Building on middle-status conformity logic, we argue that members occupying moderate levels of social power experience heightened status threat because they have both meaningful standing to protect and realistic prospects for advancement. As a result, they engage in power-enhancing, dependency-creating behaviors such as helping. We further propose that the curvature of the power helping relationship depends on properties of the team’s informal hierarchy, including members’ disagreement about influence rankings and the steepness of influence dispersion. We test these ideas in a field study of interdependent project teams in an R&D unit of a global manufacturer in the Netherlands, using round-robin peer ratings to capture directed helping ties and peer-assessed influence. Random-effects analyses of 1,246 dyadic observations show a positive, diminishing-returns relationship between influence and helping, indicating that the largest marginal increase in helping occurs from low to moderate power. Moderation tests further show that hierarchy steepness systematically shifts where helping is concentrated, with steeper hierarchies amplifying helping among higher-power members and suppressing helping among lower-power members, whereas evidence for disagreement-based moderation is weaker. These findings extend middle-status conformity to small teams and clarify how status threat and hierarchy structure shape the distribution of cooperative behavior.