Social dominance and interpersonal power: Asymmetrical relationships within hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating work environments

We studied whether high-social dominant employees sustain hierarchies in different hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating organizations endorsing harsh and soft power tactics. We found that social dominance orientation was positively associated with harsh power tactics, and negatively associated with soft power tactics. Employees higher in social dominance orientation endorsed harsh and opposed to soft power tactics as respectively hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating legitimizing myths that promote a dominant-submissive form of intergroup relationships. We also found that supervisors higher in social dominance, due to their dominant position, strongly opposed soft power tactics more than subordinates did. Amongst high-social dominant employees in the hierarchy-attenuating (vs. hierarchy-enhancing) organization, we observed the strongest opposition to soft power tactics, which are the tactics most shared in an organization which tends to attenuate hierarchies.