The Cost of Collaborating with Climbers of Status Hierarchies: Status Dynamics, Tie Creation and Performance in Science

Rank-ordered relationships depicturing status and status differences have been shown to emerge in social settings as different as film production, professional sport, education, wine making, open source communities, and medical doctors. These status hierarchies tend to be relatively stable, but at times individuals or organizations successfully climb the status hierarchy or fall from grace. A growing body of research focuses on these status dynamics rather than static status measures. Based on data from 826 scientists affiliated with a Large Scale Research Facility (LSRF) collaborating on 1282 on-site and 151,302 off-site publications we analyze relationships between status dynamics, tie formation and performance among scientists. We find that there is a cost of collaborating with rising stars – in the form of increasing status - as collaboration partners’ positive status shifts is negatively associated with the focal scientist’s performance. Also, we find that the association between individual scientists’ status attainment and tie creation follows and inverted U-shape, while the relationship between status attainment and performance is positive. Finally, we find that status decline has a negative association with both tie creation and subsequent performance.