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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Texas lands at No. 13 in WalletHub innovation study

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During a SXSW reception March 12 at the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, Gov. Greg Abbott hailed Texas as the No. 1 state for innovation. Personal finance website WalletHub doesn’t see it that way, though.

A new study from WalletHub assigns Texas a No. 13 ranking for innovation among the states and the District of Columbia. D.C. comes out on top, followed by Massachusetts, California, Colorado and Washington. Mississippi appears at the bottom of the list.

Texas earns an innovation score of 49.56, compared with 69.13 for top-ranked D.C. In two broad categories, Texas ranks 12th for human capital and 13th for innovation environment.

To identify the top places for innovation, WalletHub evaluated the 50 states and D.C. by reviewing 25 key indicators of innovation friendliness. The indicators include:

  • Share of STEM professionals.
  • Forecast for Share of STEM professionals
  • Forecast for STEM jobs
  • Eighth-grade math and science performance
  • Concentration of tech companies
  • R&D spending per capita
  • Share of science and engineering graduates age 25 and over
  • Average internet speed
  • Venture capital funding per capita

“The most innovative states are especially attractive to people who have majored in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, as they offer abundant career opportunities and investment dollars, both for jobs at existing companies and for startups,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo said in the report.

“These states also instill young students with the skills they need to succeed in the current workforce, skills which are useful whether or not they pursue a STEM career,” he added.

Texas zeroes in on semiconductor industry

On the innovation front, Abbott and other state leaders have focused intently on growing the state’s semiconductor industry, which generates roughly $30 billion to $60 billion in economic activity per year. Texas ranks among the top states for semiconductor manufacturing, with major operations in North Texas and Central Texas.

To bolster the industry, Abbott signed the Texas CHIPS Act into law in 2023. The law established the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund, which issues grants for semiconductor research, design and manufacturing, and the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Consortium, which advises the governor and state legislators on matters related to the semiconductor sector.

Among the consortium’s appointed representatives are:

  • Joe Elabd, vice chancellor for research at the Texas A&M University System
  • David Staack, deputy vice chancellor for research at the Texas A&M University System
  • Ramanan Krishnamoorti, vice president for energy and innovation at the University of Houston
  • Magesh Rajan, vice president for research and innovation at Prairie View A&M University

Semiconductor companies with a presence in the Houston area include chip manufacturer NVIDIA, which is building an AI supercomputer factory in Houston; Labtopia, a tech staffing firm that does business in the semiconductor sector; Microchip USA, a distributor of semiconductors and other electronic components that opened an office in Kingwood last year; and Infineon Technologies, which designs, develops, and manufactures semiconductors.

The Greater Houston Partnership touts the Houston area’s track record as an innovation hub.

“As a home to world-changing innovations and a talented labor pool, Houston has been an attractive region for innovation and startups across all key industries for years,” the partnership says, “and as a major player as a center of activity for the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.”

Houston fuels energy innovation

As for energy innovation in the Houston area, Abbott last month announced a 455-megawatt, $617 million natural gas plant that Houston-based NRG Energy is building at its Greens Bayou facility in north Harris County is now a designated project under the Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation (JETI) program. JETI offers economic incentives for qualifying projects.

The NRG plant is expected to begin generating power for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) in 2028.

Other energy innovators in the Houston area include Chevron, ExxonMobil, Occidental’s 1PointFive subsidiary, Schneider Electric, Shell, AB Energy USA, Fervo Energy, Solugen and Syzygy Plasmonics.

One promising area for energy innovation in Houston is carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration (CCUS). A new study from the Houston Energy Transition Initiative (HETI) and Deloitte Consulting says the Houston area is positioned to take a leading role in the development of CCUS, thanks to the region’s chemical and refining industries, energy infrastructure, energy-heavy workforce and access to global markets.

“With supportive policy, continued innovation, and strong industry partnerships, we can accelerate [CCUS] deployment, create new low-carbon value chains, and ensure Houston remains at the forefront of the global energy transition,” said Jane Stricker, HETI’s executive director and senior vice president of energy transition.

Uber rolls out women-only ride preferences to Houston users

Women Preferences

Houston women riders and drivers can now be matched to other women on the Uber app. The ride-hailing giant has expanded its pilot program nationwide in response to customer safety concerns.

“When women riders and drivers told us they wanted more control over how they ride and earn, we listened,” wrote Uber in a blog post announcing the move. “That feedback led to Women Preferences, features designed to give women the choice to ride with other women. Since our first pilots last summer, we’ve heard just how much that choice matters — from feeling more comfortable in the back seat to more confident behind the wheel.”

According to Uber, passengers can request to be matched with a woman driver by requesting an on-demand ride, scheduling a trip in advance, or setting a preference within the ride app. If wait times are longer than anticipated, the rider can opt to be paired with a driver of any sex.

Uber says it began offering the rides in 2019, after women in Saudi Arabia gained the right to drive. Since then, it has rolled out the program in Europe, Latin America, Australia, and Africa — although in some countries, only drivers can make the match.

The move forward on Women Preferences comes despite a pair of lawsuits aimed at Uber and its main competitor, Lyft. According to Time reporting, the plaintiff’s lawyers argue that women-only rides unfairly limit the volume of rides for male drivers and reinforce gender stereotypes about men.

Lyft rolled out its similar program, Women + Connect, in 2023. The initiative is slightly more expansive than Uber’s preferences, allowing both women and nonbinary people to participate.

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

6 Houston entrepreneurs land on coveted Inc. Female Founders 500 list

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Six Houston female entrepreneurs and innovators were named to the 2026 Female Founders 500 list.

The annual list compiled by Inc. Magazine recognizes female founders based in the U.S. who have built businesses that have moved their industries forward. The group collectively generated approximately $12.3 billion in 2025 revenue and $12.2 billion in funding to date, according to Inc. Five Houstonians were named to the list last year.

"Each year, we are increasingly amazed by the extraordinary leaders on our Inc. Female Founders 500 list," Bonny Ghosh, editorial director at Inc., said in a news release. "The honorees on this year's list include innovators in AI, beauty and wellness trendsetters winning devoted fans, and nonprofit leaders making a real impact in their communities. Together, they're showing all of us what trailblazing female leadership looks like."

The Houston founders are:

  • Sassie Duggleby, CEO and co-founder of Houston space tech and engine company Venus Aerospace. Duggleby also serves on the Texas Space Commission board of directors.
  • Stephanie Murphy, CEO and executive chairman of Aegis Aerospace, which provides space services, spaceflight product development, and engineering services. Murphy also serves as chair of the Texas Aerospace Research and Space Economy Consortium Executive Committee.
  • Laureen Meroueh, CEO and founder of Hertha Metals, which has developed a cost-effective and energy-efficient process that converts low-grade iron ore of any format directly into molten steel or high-purity iron in a single step.
  • LaToshia Norwood, managing partner of L'Renee & Associates (LRA), a full-service project management consulting firm.
  • Lauren Rottet, president and founding principal of Rottet Studio, an international architecture and design firm focused on corporate, lifestyle and hospitality projects
  • Nina Magon, founder and CEO of Nina Magon Studio / Nina Magon Consumer Products, a residential and commercial interior design company. She also co-founded KA Residences earlier this year.

"Grateful to be recognized again on the Inc. Female Founders 500," Duggleby said in a LinkedIn post. "The best part of building Venus Aerospace has been working with an incredible team pushing the boundaries of flight—and helping bring more women into aerospace along the way.

Meroueh, whose company emerged from stealth last year, voiced a similar push for bringing more women into the fold.

"We've seen a 7x jump in female-led IPOs over the last decade, from just two in 2014 (less than 1% of all IPOs) to 14 in 2024 (nearly 9% of all IPOs). Progress is happening," Meroueh shared in a LinkedIn post. "Yet, less than 1% of venture funding in hard tech goes to female-founded companies. But as my friend Ana Kraft says, the right man for the job may be a woman."

Twenty-nine Texas female founders made this list, including Amber Venz Box, founder of the Dallas-based LTK shopping platform, and Cheryl Sew Hoy, CEO and founder of Austin-based Tiny Health, a fast-growing at-home microbiome health platform. See the full list of winners here.

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