As companies increasingly rely on flatter and leaner structures, emerging as an informal leader on a team is often a gateway for ascending the corporate ladder. Given these wide-ranging effects, we examined how social class affects a critical process in today’s organizations: who a team sees as having leaderlike influence even though they may not have any formal status or authority.

Social class can be defined as the resources a person possesses during their lifetime and the interpretation of those resources. Growing up in environments characterized by more or fewer resources reflects distinct worlds that ultimately shape how people think, act, and feel.

Despite Not Being More or Less Qualified, People from Higher Social Class Backgrounds are More Apt to Emerge as Leaders

In our research, recently published in the Journal of Management Studies, we found that teammates saw people who grew up with wealthier and more educated parents, had more high-brow cultural experiences like attending classical concerts, and whose families have more prestigious friends as occupying positions of higher social class. Those recognized as hailing from higher social class backgrounds were more likely to become informal leaders within their team.

Yet, those who emerged as leaders did not necessarily have better ideas or contribute more to the group. Instead, it appears that their higher social class backgrounds led others to see them as more influential. And once the higher class teammates emerged as informal leaders, they retained this distinction even if people joined or left the team or new challenges arose. They persisted as the leader even though there may have been good reasons to reassign these roles.

Based on two separate studies involving over 500 people working in 90 teams, our findings raise some interesting questions. First, it appears there may be some limitations to the benefits of relying on informal leadership. Rather than being an adaptive and fluid process, we found that social class’s rapid and influential attributions clouded informal leadership judgments. Second, there may also be a dark side of informal leadership. Although teammates readily afford higher social class workers informal leadership positions, it may not be based on higher performance.

How Companies Can Mitigate the Influence of Social Class

Companies interested in mitigating these class-based effects within their workforce can start by recognizing that class-based differences exist. Compared to other forms of diversity, many societies, including the United States, regularly deny the existence of social class. It is often not legally protected and can even be used as a basis of prejudice.

The first step for many firms may be cultivating an awareness of social class as a characteristic by which rewards may be distributed unequally. Teams may also ask themselves, “Who often emerges as a leader in our group?” Suppose it appears that higher social class individuals are often initiating and steering the team’s conversation. In that case, there may be value in instituting more structure to the group’s interactions. For instance, encouraging more formal turn-taking during talks, rather than a free-for-all, and asking members to submit ideas and reactions anonymously before and after meetings are ways that companies can more equitably allocate informal influence.