People care deeply about their relative standings within organisations.
Job titles and pay cheques are both pretty good clues to status, but they do not measure everything.
Some employees wield influence without power.
Others have an important-sounding role and are routinely ignored.
Status can be harnessed as a way to motivate.
It can just as easily cause pettifogging conflict.
As a test of how much status can matter,
persuading people to risk their lives for it is a pretty good one.
Research by Leonardo Bursztyn of the University of Chicago and his co-authors
sifts through data on the performance of German fighter pilots
during the second world war, and finds that effort seems to be tied
to eligibility for medals.
At the start of the war,
the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross was the gold-standard medal for individual bravery;
German aces got them for achieving a quota of aerial victories.
But as the fighting continued, and more and more pilots got the medal, its prestige was gradually diluted.
So new, higher-status variants were gradually introduced:
from the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves in 1940
all the way up to the Knight's Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds in 1944.
The study shows that as pilots neared the threshold for winning the next medal on the ladder,