9400887 Berger This is an award under the Grants for Improving Doctoral Dissertation Research Program. It is an experimental study of the impact of task feedback on expectations for competence and status. It is well known that small task oriented groups tend to stratify into consistent patterns of participation, task activity, reward behavior and influence. Recently, theorists have begun to examine the conditions under which these interaction hierarchies become legitimated or normative for the members of the group. This study seeks to test the argument, developed from expectation states theory, that feedback on the outcome of a task will have important consequences for the likelihood of legitimation in subsequent tasks. The likelihood of legitimation based on initial status is experimentally crossed with the presence or absence of positive external feedback which increases the likelihood of such legitimation occurring. %%% This experiment tests an important extension of expectation states theory, which has become highly influential in research on group processes in both sociology and social psychology. This tradition has contributed in the past to administrative and management science, and we would expect this study to do so as well. In addition to the scientific gains to be achieved by the research, this award will materially assist a highly promising student in completing research for the Ph.D. dissertation. Thus it contributes to the future scientific manpower of the nation and the thorough training of the next generation of social scientists. ***
