Who gets ahead? a meta-analysis of self-monitoring and status Criteria

Status has major implications for success in social and organizational hierarchies. Accordingly, researchers have shown great interest in the dispositional antecedents of attaining status. Among antecedents, self-monitoring has been theoretically linked to concerns for and ability to cultivate status, but linkages have never been quantitatively reviewed. We introduce a new organizational framework for status criteria, and then use meta-analysis to examine self-monitoring's criterion-oriented validity for status criteria, its nomological network to other dispositional antecedents of status, and its incremental validity over these other antecedents. We also conduct scale-specific moderator analyses. Overall, self- monitoring shows criterion-oriented validity for status criteria, good discriminant validity to other dispositional antecedents of status, and incremental validity for most criteria examined. We discuss implications of our findings for assessment and theory, and recommend two new research directions to better understand how individuals attain status.