Classical Deviation: OrganizationalandIndividual Status as Antecedents of Conformity
研究组织与个体地位如何影响一致性行为，发现中等地位的组织更倾向于模仿同行，中等地位的领导者更倾向于选择常规方案，且这种效应受组织地位和模仿程度调节。
Beside making organizations look like their peers through the adoption of similar attributes (“alignment”), this paper highlights the fact that conformity also enables organizations to stand out by exhibiting highly salient attributes key to their field or industry (“conventionality”). Building on the conformity and status literatures, and using the case of major U.S. symphony orchestras and the changes in their concert programming between 1879 and 1969, we hypothesize and find that middle-status organizations are more aligned and middle-status individual leaders make more conventional choices than their low- and high-status peers. In addition, the extent to which middle-status leaders adopt conventional programming is shown to be moderated by the status of the organization and by its level of alignment. Thus, this paper offers a novel theory and operationalization of organizational conformity, and contributes to the literature on status effects, and, more broadly, to the understanding of the key issues of distinctiveness and conformity.