Social Dominance Theory as a basis for understanding social hierarchies influencing public sector organisations

Employees’ social status might have a strong impact on their work satisfaction and organisational performance and individuals will go to surprising lengths to gain and guard their status. Very few studies have focussed on... [ view full abstract ]

Employees’ social status might have a strong impact on their work satisfaction and organisational performance and individuals will go to surprising lengths to gain and guard their status. Very few studies have focussed on employee’s status in public sector organisations and few public sector organisational behaviour scholars have employed the Social Dominance Theory (SDT) in their research. An extensive review of the literature available could not detect that the Social Dominance Theory have been used in public sector organisations. Most of the studies conducted using the SDO6 scale, were done in North America and often included students. The variables taken into consideration included age and gender. It is our opinion that the length of employment would also have a pertinent influence on an individual’s social dominance orientation and was added as a variable. The research questions thus focused on the influence of these variables relating to status orientation. This paper will elaborate on the use of Social Dominance Orientation and the SDT to analyse the manifestation of status as a result of the operation of diverse group-based social hierarchies in diverse societies that expect services to be equally delivered to them by government. SDT distinguishes between Hierarchy-attenuating (HA) and Hierarchy-enhancing (HE) institutions. HA includes organisations, groups and societies that are devoted to equal opportunities such as human rights organisations. HE includes groups and organisations that in nature protect the wealthy such as profit-maximising companies. Strictly speaking, public sector organisations should be hierarchy-attenuating organisations. The South African public sector workforce is diverse in nature with a variety of language preferences characterised by ethnic-cultural diversity and has a political history embedded in apartheid and patriarchy. Research for this paper has largely utilized the construct of SDO (as the psychological component of the SDT), and did not fully take advantage of the multi-level nature of the theory. In this paper the term “status” refers to an individual’s or group’s prestige or honour as well as an individual’s claim to respect and compliance in relations with others. This paper reports on an empirical study, using the SDO6 sale exploring the perceptions of diverse public servants. SPSS was used to capture and analyse generated dated. This exploratory study used a limited sample but the sample is similar to those used by other researchers who utilised the SDO scale. The preliminary findings supported previous studies conducted identifying the Social Dominance Orientation-Dominance (SDO-D) and Social Dominance Orientation-Egalitarianism (SDO-E) factors. Principal Component Analysis was used to assess the structure of the scale. The research indicates that with a definite age and gender variety between the study respondents, some would have been employed during apartheid and some only in a democratic South Africa which in this study did not influence their status orientation. In conclusion this paper provides suggestions on how organisations can manage these different status orientations with a specific focus on ethnic-cultural diversity and the multi-generational workforce which was determined from literature, focus group discussions and open-ended interview questions.