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The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive analysis of how sentiments may be a part of, or adjacent to, status generalization. We demonstrate why this problem is so difficult to solve definitively, as many resolutions may exist. Sentiments may present the properties of graded status characteristics but may also be disrupted by processes of the self. Sentiments may have status properties enacted within dyadic interactions. However, sentiments may also be status elements during triadic constellations of actors. Finally, we discuss current research that is underway to provide more empirical evidence to offer confirmation or disconfirmation for some of our proposed models.

We provide a synthesis of literatures, including pieces from group processes, neuroscience, psychology, and network scholarship, to address the relation between sentiment and status processes. Accordingly, this is a conceptual chapter.

We attempt to motivate future research by exploring the many complications of examining these issues.

Understanding how social inequalities may emerge during group interaction allows researchers to address their deleterious effects. Positive sentiments (in other words, “liking”) should bring actors closer together to complete tasks successfully. Ironically, when paired with negative sentiments within task groups, inequalities in group opportunities may result. To address these social inequalities, a thorough understanding of how they develop is necessary, so that efficacious interventions can be adopted.

This deep dive into the relation between sentiment and status processes joins the 25-year quest to understand the issues surrounding this relationship.

This chapter provides an overview of the factors influencing interpersonal dynamics in contemporary culture, including high levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), new technologies, growing competition for resources, highly diverse societies, and changing needs of professions and their likely effect on Generation Z's perspectives on interpersonal dynamics. Gen Zers prefer to do a task than lead it; like to work in groups; and are motivated by relational indicators. Overall, this is a generation that wants to come together to find solutions to epic challenges.

It is well-known and documented that despite a plethora of efforts by institutions to broaden participation in engineering, the representation, retention, and degree completion of Black males in engineering continues to lag. Coupled with a lack of representation, there is also a dearth of research that has sought to understand the experiences of Black males in engineering. In this chapter, through the lens of Hildegard Peplau's (1991) interpersonal relations theory, we sought to explore the experiences of nine undergraduate Black male engineering majors with academic advisors. Academic advisors are strategically positioned in higher education settings as guides to help students navigate college culture, policies, and procedures. Using thematic analysis, three salient themes emerged: “spots are limited,” building their own “advising team,” and prescriptive perceptions. As institutions imagine routes for broadening participation in engineering, they might also consider how they support advisors and encourage relationship development between students and advisors.

The purpose of this theoretical chapter is to rework a promising but limited theory of the foundations of reciprocity. Reciprocity is often attributed to an “internalized norm of reciprocity” – a deeply felt moral obligation to help those who have helped us in the past. Leifer's theory of local action develops a radically different and compelling foundation for reciprocity – one in which the impetus for reciprocity is a thinly veiled battle for status. We rework the theory to offer a new one that addresses its limitations. The key idea is that the impetus for reciprocity is the desire to signal that one intends to create joint value rather than to capture it from the counterparty.

Our analytical approach rests on close examination of a puzzling and underrecognized feature of social exchange: people who initiate social exchange routinely deny giving anything of value (“it was nothing”) while the receiver inflates their indebtedness to the giver (“this is too much!”). We refer to this negotiation strategy as reverse bargaining and use it as a window into the logic of social exchange.

We develop a more general theory of how people manage the threat of opportunism in social exchange that subsumes local action theory. The key insight is that people who initiate social exchange and seek reciprocity must balance two competing objectives: to ensure that the person receiving a benefit recognizes a debt she must repay; and to mitigate the receiver's suspicion that the giver's ulterior motive is to capture value from the receiver.

Scholars have pointed out the need for improvement and refinement in public management research, also depending on the role of public administration for sustainable development. Because government organizations employ a substantial portion of the workforce, management practices in the public sector are critical areas for designing, implementing and delivering policies that can achieve the goals set forth in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. For these purposes, and in implementation of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) programme, Italy recently launched an ambitious National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) which includes, among other things, upskilling goals for staff employed, following the modernization process that has involved the Italian public sector in the last decades, with the Decree n. 150/2009. Aiming both to understand the extent of the application of the reform and to answer some basic questions (why, what and how) concerning Individual Performance Appraisal Systems (IPAS), we conducted a content analysis on the 220 documents already produced by the Italian Ministries. The study has been conducted in two different steps of the reform process and provides solid evidence of the reforms' effects on designing and implementing individual performance systems. The analyzed documents reveal no longer-term vision in implementing the IPAS that involves some critical performance management utilities such as training, development, fair pay and deployment of employees, raising new questions about a sustainable approach to the individual performance management process even in public organizations.

We examine how authorities' use of fair decision-making procedures and power benevolently shape workers' impressions of them as competent and warm, which serve as a mechanism whereby authorities' behaviors shape workers' emotional responses. We investigate how the role of these impressions differs depending on authority gender and consider whether emotional responses differ for male and female subordinates.

We conducted a between-subjects experimental vignette study in which we manipulate an authority's behaviors and gender. We use multigroup mediation analysis to test our predictions.

Authorities who employ procedural justice and benevolent power elicit reports of heightened positive emotion experiences and intended displays and reports of reduced negative emotion experiences and intended displays. These behaviors also enhance views of authorities as competent and warm. The mediating role of impressions differs by authority gender. Authority behaviors prompt reports of positive emotions through conveying impressions that align with authorities' gender stereotypes (competence for men, warmth for women). In contrast, warmth impressions mediate effects of behaviors on reported negative emotions when authorities are men, whereas when authorities are women, benevolent power use directly reduces reported negative experience, and procedural justice reduces negative display. Female respondents are more likely to report positive emotion experience and display toward male authorities and negative display toward female authorities.

By examining competence and warmth impressions as mechanisms, we gain insight into how the process by which authority behaviors affect worker emotions is gendered and shed light on micro-level dynamics contributing to gender inequality at work.

Individuals develop and perform and process their identities in relationships with others as well as with the environment in which they find themselves, Many of these relationships with others are characterized by fundamental inequalities. In finding their identities, the subordinate in the relationship develops an identity that typically take steps – by vocal and non-vocal gestures – to perform this particularized identity. The identification of self is not only related to the others, with eachindividual in reflective communication, but also reflections characterized by inequality. In continuing to do so, he or she will experience a certain powerlessness, indeed what Marx called alienation.