Houston research: Understanding social hierarchy is key to professional success

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People who accurately perceive social hierarchies are also typically high performers, in part because of their high-status connections. 10'000 Hours/Getty Images

Social climbers get on people's nerves by constantly vying to be close to whoever is in charge. No wonder disparaging names for them abound: opportunists, social climbers, clout chasers. To those around them, the climbers' motives are transparent and their undignified antics laughable – until they succeed.

In a recent paper, Rice Business Professor Siyu Yu and Gavin Kilduff of the NYU Stern School of Business looked closely at social climbers' habits and their outcomes. The researchers concluded that these industrious networkers get a (partially) bad rap. In fact, the rest of us could learn from them.

To conduct their research, Yu and Kilduff launched four separate studies with a total of 1,334 people in university and corporate settings in China and the United States. Participants were asked to identify individuals in their study or workgroups who were especially "respected, admired or influential." The respondents whose choices were also deemed high-status by the rest of the group were labeled accurate perceivers of "perceived status hierarchy" (PSH). The respondents whose choices were deemed low-status by the others were labeled inaccurate perceivers of PSH.

The researchers then asked participants whom they sought out for advice and assistance. Those who previously tested accurately for PSH, they found, had more high-status contacts than those who tested poorly.

PSH accuracy was also found to be positively associated with performance, the researchers wrote. There's a logic to this. People with an accurate understanding of PSH are more likely to seek out high-status members in their social or professional group for mentorship and advice. They may also model the high-status colleagues' behavior. Through these connections, they're able to learn habits and strategies. Their alliances with high-status individuals have the power to improve their performance, gleaned from the individuals' best practices, knowledge and skillsets.

People who are less accurate status perceivers, the researchers said, typically build rapport with individuals who are lower on the totem pole. Through these lower-status members, they may learn inefficient and detrimental work habits, limiting their chances for success. To rise in any competitive hierarchy, it is imperative to identify, align and imitate high-status individuals.

But who exactly are these coveted high-status allies – and what makes them so valuable to others? Our species evolved to seek proximity and prolonged interaction with high performers, Yu and Kilduff noted. Within homogeneous units, prestigious individuals are typically more competent than lower-status group members. High-status individuals are often generous and group-motivated, so lower-status members benefit from their superior prowess.

Important as status associations are, the researchers argued, opportunities to interact with high-status individuals are involuntarily limited for people in marginalized groups. No matter how accurate a worker's PSH discernment may be, systemic forces may keep her from ever speaking – or being listened to – by someone with a high enough status to guide or advocate for her.

At the same time, research shows that diverse opinions are important for growth and decision-making. To improve efficiency and overall functioning, Yu's team argued, schools, businesses and other institutions need to create established paths for those perceived as low-status to have access to those higher in status.

One important tool, the team wrote, is the creation of well-rounded mentorship programs. Another is a process for scouring biases from selection and hiring processes.

Want to get to the top? Being nice to the receptionist and every other employee up and down the ladder makes a difference. But you'll also need to seek out colleagues with power and prestige. So the next time you see a status-chaser in action, stifle the righteous sneer. You may even decide to swallow your pride and try to curry some favor yourself.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and is based on research from Siyu Yu, assistant professor of management – organizational behavior at Jones Graduate School of Business, and Gavin J. Kilduff, associate professor of management and organizations at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

Most workers surveyed visualize their organization as either a ladder structure or a pyramid, and the quality of relationships in pyramid-structured workplaces is higher than in ladder-structured workplaces. Photo via Pexels

The way a workplace is structured can make or break business, Rice University research finds

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It's a paradox of power: research shows that hierarchies often undermine the very structures they are designed to uphold. Within organizations, conflicts between members can erode entire systems. In a groundbreaking paper, Rice Business Professor Siyu Yu shows that even visual perceptions of the hierarchy can influence its success.

In the first study of its kind, Yu joined a team of colleagues to explore how humans visualize the hierarchies to which they belong – and how that thought process influences group processes and outcomes.

The researchers found that most of the people they studied thought of hierarchies in terms of pyramids or ladders (a tiny minority visualized them as circles or squares). In a ladder hierarchy or stratified structure, each member occupies a particular rung. A pyramid hierarchy is more centralized, with one person at the top and multiple people on the lower levels. Think of corporate giant CISCO, a typical pyramid, versus a mid-size dry cleaning business, with the owner at the top and one person on each rung below, down to the entry-level cashier.

These are far more than fanciful images, the researchers argued. Psychological research has long shown that individuals think, feel and act in response to mental representations of their environment. Intuitively, the link between perception and behavior has been articulated as far back as biblical times: "As a man thinketh, so is he" – or, for that matter, she or they.

To better understand the practical effects of these visualizations, Yu's team conducted five studies with 2,951 people and 221 workplace groups. They chose from nationwide pools monitored by West and East Coast American universities. The studies took place in the United States and the Netherlands and included multiple ethnicities, men and women, and income groups ranging from college students to seasoned professionals earning upwards of $90,000 annually.

In the first study, the team asked participants to indicate the shape that best reflected how they thought about hierarchies: pyramid, ladder, circle or square. In the second study, the researchers measured social relationship quality within different groups: participants were asked to rate their answers to questions such as, "Are your needs met at work? Do you feel socially supported?" In the third study, the researchers focused on professional workgroups, measuring relationship quality, group performance and the likelihood that individuals compare themselves to others in the group.

Subjects who perceived their working group as a ladder, the researchers found, were more likely to compare their rank and station with others. Their relationships were also weaker: when asked whether they trusted their team members, most subjects disagreed or strongly disagreed. When asked whether they thought about if they were better or worse than their colleagues, they agreed and strongly agreed. These comparisons and lack of trust indirectly correlated with lower performance levels, the research showed.

Perceiving one's organization as a ladder structure, Yu's team argued, undermines group members' relationships with each other and hinders collective performance. In contrast, participants who visualized the same company as pyramids rated radically higher on all three quality measures.

Interestingly, the impact of these visualizations is similar, whether the visualizations reflect an actual company structure or simply an individual's perception of that structure. "It can be created by both perception and actual rank, for example, job titles," Yu said in an interview. "So, as a practical implication, companies should think about ways to reduce the ladder system, such as with a promotion system that seems more like a pyramid, or by creating the mutual belief that upward mobility within the company is not a ladder or zero-sum."

Managers, in other words, need to pay close attention to how subordinates see their workplace. Even if your firm is structured as a pyramid, your team members could perceive it to be a ladder – with a cut-throat climb to the top. For the sake of both work performance and quality of life, Yu said, managers, human resources directors and C-suite members should do their best to discern how their workers visualize the company – and, if the paradigm is a ladder, work hard to reduce the workplace vertigo that goes with it.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and is based on research from Siyu Yu, an assistant professor of management and organizational behavior at the Jones Graduate School of Business Rice University.

Research and common sense suggest that membership in a high social class improves one's sense of well being. Photo by fauxels from Pexels

Rice University researcher looks into what creates social well being

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How nice! You're early. It's just you and your mat, alone for a moment at the office's weekly Zoom yoga session. Breathing in, you silently applaud yourself for investing in your well-being.

Then a guy from upper management pops onto the screen for a bit of his own inner peace. He's not even looking your way, but suddenly you're comparing yourself to a fit, well-groomed, manicured corporate star. You wonder if you're a victim of a gender wage gap. You muse whether your social standing is undermined by race, age or your choice of partner.

Humans can't help comparing social status. What goes into the social pecking order, however, is surprisingly complex. What we call social class is actually a web of subtle signals telegraphing traits including wealth, education and occupational prestige.

But the effects of social class are concrete. Membership in a high social class alters our influence over other people, our professional and personal opportunities, even our health. Social class even affects the private, internal gauge of how we're doing – what researchers call subjective well-being, or SWB. And what you, in Zoom yoga, might call your level of chill.

But why exactly is external class ranking so potent?

For years, research and common sense suggested that external social class largely determines our subjective well-being. But the exact dynamic has never been fully analyzed. So in a recent paper, Rice Business Professor Siyu Yu and colleague Steven Blader, of NYU Stern, looked closely at how the status/well-being link functions – and why, in certain cases, it's irrelevant.

According to their findings, simply belonging to a higher social class actually has a weaker, less consistent effect on inner well-being than do two specific components of class: status and power.

To analyze the way status and power affect the impact of social class, Yu and Blader designed a set of four studies. In one, they used archival data from two employee surveys, Midlife In The United States and Midlife In Japan, to measure employee status and power and how these variables affected each individual's social class and sense of subjective well-being.

In the three others, the team analyzed the interplay of social class, power and status in various walks of life. To do this, they looked at employee data sets of 325 and 370 people respectively, drawn from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a crowdsourced marketplace favored by researchers which performs tasks virtually). In one study, the researchers ranked each participant's self-perceived social class by asking them to state their own level of status and power. In another, they asked 250 participants questions about their individual psychological needs and how they might be addressed by status or by power. In the third, they isolated the precise ways that status and power affect subjective well-being.

Status, the researchers found, greatly boosted the effect of social class on subjective well-being. Power, they found, had separate and significant effects of its own on SBW. Of the two separate factors, status had the stronger impact. The researchers theorized that this is because power, energizing as it may be, also tends to stunt feelings of social support and relatedness, which is crucial to a sense of well-being. High status, on the other hand, is by definition a reflection of relationships, which we're hard-wired to crave. As Yu and her cowriter put it, status is "voluntarily and continuously conferred based on one's personal characteristics and behaviors and, thus, others' … highly personalized assessment of our value."

Both status and power, the evidence suggested, boost inner well-being because they fulfill key psychological needs: our desire to belong, for example, or our wish to have a say in situations affecting us.

Partly because of the study's methodology limitations, however, the researchers cautioned there's more to understand. Most pressing: in the U.S. sample, between 83%-95% of participants were white. Would the researchers' current findings hold true across a broader racial spectrum? How about with groups that have spent decades overcoming outside assaults on their sense of self?

What the team's research does show definitively is the multi-faceted nature of social class – something that otherwise might seem to be monolithic. It sheds light on the various facets that make up social rank. And it spotlights the need for research on the separate effects of power, of status, and how each element fulfills psychological needs. Isolating the effects of these factors, Yu and his colleague argued, show why researchers need to consider power and status distinctly when studying issues like income, education and occupation.

Back to Zoom yoga. Breathe out. Then do your best to just look away from your high-ranking colleague in the neighboring zoom box. You're not imagining the unease you felt when he sailed into the room. Yet who knows? Your high-flying superior worker may not actually feel as respected or empowered as you'd think when he rolls up his mat and goes back to his desktop. You, meanwhile, are equipped with new analytical insights that could help establish your next goals. Do you aspire to more power? More external esteem? Or maybe you already possess some other key to inner equilibrium – some element in apart from either status and power – that research has yet to uncover.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and is based on research from Siyu Yu, an assistant professor of management – organizational behavior at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

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Intuitive Machines lands $148M as part of NASA Moon Base funding

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Houston-based Intuitive Machines has been awarded $148.3 million to deliver its Nova-C lander to the moon by 2028. The funding is part of $600 million that NASA recently awarded to three companies as part of the agency’s Moon Base Program.

The contracts aim to support sustained human presence and commercial operations on the Moon. Austin-based Firefly Aerospace was awarded $144.2 million by NASA for one mission and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic netted $297.9 million for two lunar landings. Intuitive Machine's award is the company's sixth task order under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

“We’re building a proving ground for Moon Base operations,” Ryan Stephan, NASA’s Moon Base acting director of cargo landers, said in a news release. “Accelerating our Moon mission ordering cadence and launch opportunities enable us to move quickly to learn, iterate, and improve.”

Under the latest task order, Intuitie Machines will deliver three scientific and operational payloads to the moon, which include a:

  • Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS) radiation monitor to gather critical environmental safety data
  • Advanced stereo cameras to analyze surface-plume interactions (SCALPSS)
  • Laser retroreflector array (LRA) for precise cislunar positioning

The funding breakdown includes a $68.6 million base contract and a $79.7 million performance incentive for Intuitive Machines.

The company says the funding will allow it to create a standardized and repeatable "lunar utility pipeline" for delivering cargo to the moon.

"We are shifting the paradigm from custom aerospace engineering to commercial mass production of lunar infrastructure," Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, said in a separate news release. "Our flight-proven Nova-C platform allows us to build, test, and deploy multiple landers in parallel using Industry 4.0-powered manufacturing. This contract directly advances our core mission to provide persistent, reliable, and commercial baseline of transport, connectivity, and operations that allows our customers to stay longer and achieve more on the Moon."

NASA also shared that it is exploring plans to send PROMISE, a rover based on the Mars Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, to the moon and it plans to seek proposals for additional lunar lander missions, technology demonstrations, a communications and navigation satellite network, and new science payloads to support its lunar outpost. NASA is developing its Moon Base near the lunar South Pole. The agency expects it to come to fruition sometime after 2032.

Intuitive Machines had received its last CLPS award for $180.4 million in March 2026. It will be the first mission to utilize the company's larger cargo lunar lander, Nova-D. The company was also recently awarded a $1 million grant from Maryland Gov. Wes Moore to expand its robotics operations in the state.

UT team develops wearable technology for atmospheric water harvesting

In The Air

Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a prototype jacket that harvests clean drinking water directly from the atmosphere, and it works even in the driest desert conditions.

The research, published in Science Advances, marks the latest milestone in nearly a decade of work by materials scientist and chair professor Guihua Yu and his team at the Cockrell School of Engineering's Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute. The wearable technology marks a significant leap: instead of a bulky, stationary machine, this jacket does the work.

Photo courtesy of UT Austin

"We have been working on atmospheric water harvesting technology for a number of years," Yu says. "This current version is even more wearable. We're transitioning from conventional, more stationary water harvesting to something truly portable and personal."

Yu's lab first published work on hydrogel-based water harvesting around 2019, and the jacket is the latest evolution of that platform, now called AirGel. Last year, the broader AirGel invention won the top prize in the graduate category of the National Collegiate Inventors Competition.

The jacket is woven with specially engineered hydrogel fibers; ultra-porous materials that attract and absorb moisture from the surrounding air much like a household desiccant. Unlike a desiccant, the material doesn't require intense heat to release that water. The hydrogel is thermally responsive, meaning a modest rise in temperature — even from mild solar heating — is enough to release the water it has captured.

Condenser test in AustinSo, somebody would be wearing the jacket, or perhaps carrying this gel-like textile as a blanket, as it passively absorbs moisture from the air. Then they would detach the textile panels and place them into a small, portable collector unit; essentially a compact heater. The water evaporates out of the textile, condenses inside the collector, and drips out as clean, drinkable water.

"It immediately becomes drinkable because it already goes through the distillation process," Yu explains.

In trials, the jacket produced between 400 and 900 milliliters of water per day depending on humidity, or roughly 14-30 ounces, nearly a quart, depending on the air's humidity. With one kilogram of the textile, the researchers found they could generate approximately 3.7-4 liters of water in arid conditions, and potentially double that in humid ones. So far, the team has tried the jacket out in very dry, semi-dry, and humid areas, and the jacket was able to pull water from each climate.

Lead researcher Chuxin Lei, a postdoctoral researcher on Yu's team and co-author on the paper, says the goal was to rethink who this technology could serve.

Portable bag contents

"Many current [atmospheric water harvesting] systems are still built as rigid or stationary platforms, making them less suitable for people who are moving, working outdoors, or operating in some remote environment. This lead us to ask whether we could build a water harvesting system that could become more like clothing — light, wearable, flexible, and naturally suited for personal use," Lei says.

The potential applications are wide-ranging. Yu's team has previously worked with the Department of Defense on water solutions for soldiers, where water logistics can be dangerous and costly. The technology could also serve hikers, emergency responders, disaster relief workers, and agricultural and field workers. Anyone who needs clean water on the go and far from infrastructure.

The team also sees a potential future where the technology complements large-scale centralized water systems rather than replacing them.

"Our solution cannot be a universal solution for all," Yu acknowledges. "But I think it's an extremely important alternative."

For now, the jacket is still a laboratory prototype, but Yu and Lei are optimistic. With the right industry partnerships, they say, the technology could realistically reach commercial scale within three to five years.

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com, written by Natalie Grigson.

Houston ranks among world’s top 30 emerging startup ecosystems

Startup Status

Long known as the Energy Capital of the World, Houston also ranks among the world’s top 30 emerging startup ecosystems, according to a new report.

The report from Startup Genome, a research and advisory organization, doesn’t assign a specific numeric ranking to Houston’s startup ecosystem. Rather, it puts Houston in the ranking range of 21 to 30 for emerging ecosystems. Startup Genome weighed factors such as early-stage funding, performance and talent to identify the top emerging ecosystems.

Houston also gained notice for being one of the world’s 20 emerging ecosystems with at least four unicorn startups in the past 10 years. Houston and nine other ecosystems each had four unicorns.

According to StartupBlink, a startup research platform, Houston’s startup ecosystem grew 24 percent in 2025, with over 1,300 startups and total startup funding exceeding $808 million. StartupBlink places Houston at No. 46 among the world’s top 100 startup ecosystems.

In a recent post on LinkedIn, David Horsup, executive in residence at the Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator, wrote that Houston “has all the ingredients to be wildly successful if it stays true to its differentiated pillars that drive the economy — energy, medical, and aerospace.”

Mumbai topped Startup Genome’s list of emerging ecosystems, followed by Istanbul, Madrid, Salt Lake City-Provo and Barcelona. After Salt Lake City-Provo, the top U.S. ecosystems were Phoenix, Detroit, Minneapolis and Las Vegas.

Silicon Valley led Startup Genome’s ranking of the world’s top established ecosystems, followed by New York City, London, Tel Aviv and Boston. Austin landed at No. 18 in this category and Dallas at No. 27.

“For much of the past decade, this report has chronicled the welcome dispersion of opportunity beyond the traditional hubs,” Startup Genome writes. “That trend has not died — but it has been complicated. Capital and scale are consolidating once more, particularly in the United States, and the gap between leading and emerging ecosystems is widening.”

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