A Review on the Dynamic Change of Team Members’ Status

Status is the basic reality that team members face in the workplace. The view that status is one of the basic needs of human beings has also been universally recognized by scholars. Previous studies on status mostly regard status as a static and stable phenomenon to explore the impact of different team members’ status differences. However, status is not unchanged, but in the process of continuous acquisition, maintenance and loss of change. Scholars have expanded this field from the causes, antecedents and impacts of changes in status. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive literature to summarize the existing research and point out the direction for future research. Therefore, this paper firstly defines team membership and distinguishes it from other similar concepts such as power, reputation, influence, etc. Status is the degree to which a person is respected, worshipped and voluntarily complied with by others because of his perceived instrumental social value. Secondly, this paper reviews the existing literature on the static research of team members’ status, and holds that the static research of team members’ status mainly focuses on two topics: identifying the advantages brought by high status of team members and exploring the internal mechanism of maintaining stable status. Thirdly, this paper focuses on the dynamic change of team members’ status. The dynamic change of team members’ status mainly focuses on the related research of team members’ status acquisition and status loss. Status acquisition refers to the promotion of team members’ status in the team; status loss refers to the reduction of their status in the team. The dynamic change of status mainly involves the interaction of individuals, other team members and situations. At present, most studies neglect the role of context and only discuss the interaction between individuals and other members of the team, which is a major drawback of current research. According to the way of setting the situation, we divide the current research on the dynamic change of status into three aspects: the passive perspective, the interactive perspective and the situational decision perspective. The passive perspective is also called the functional perspective, which emphasizes the subjective initiative of the individual and regards the situation as given and passive. The interactive perspective emphasizes the interaction between individual subjective factors and situations, breaking through the hypothesis that the team is task-oriented, and takes overall performance as the main goal. The situational decision perspective emphasizes the influence of environment itself and its sudden change of the active selection effect on status acquisition and loss. From this perspective, the situation is in the active actor position, while the individual is the passive acceptance role. Based on the above three research perspectives, this paper summarizes the relevant research on the acquisition and loss of existing status, and obtains an integrated theoretical framework. In addition, this paper also describes the dynamic process of status change (the process of status acquisition and the process of status loss) from three perspectives. At the same time, this paper also elaborates the antecedent variables and influence results of team members’ status. Finally, this paper summarizes the shortcomings of the existing research and points out future research directions.