Chapter 11: From Role Conflict to Evaluation Discordance: How Do Conflicting Performance Evaluations Affect Risk Taking in Multiple Audience Contexts?

Individuals and organizations alike often play multiple social roles. An adult male, for instance, may play employee, father, and husband (and possible several other things) within the span of a single day. A firm can play market leader in an industrial context and concerned community member in a social one. Although some roles may never come in contact with one another, others can carry competing expectations and present conflicts for those occupying them. Indeed, it was precisely the observation that social actors are obliged to simultaneously play multiple, possibly conflicting roles that motivated a significant amount of research in sociology that investigated the consequences of “role conflicts” and “status inconsistencies” (Benoit-Smullyan, 1944; Hughes, 1945; Lenski, 1954, 1956; Marks, 1977). According to these theories, people whose status is higher in one role than it is in another will experience frustration and anxiety, and that this emotional response will subsequently affect both preferences and behaviors. Despite the initial appeal of such theories, however, they are now largely overlooked due to an array of theoretical and methodological problems that came to be associated with the early work. In this chapter I revisit role conflict theory in order to integrate one of its core assumptions—that is, social life involves residing in multiple contexts simultaneously—with more enduring theories about social comparison and performance feedback (e.g., Cyert & March, 1992; Festinger, 1954; Greve, 2003). In their integration, a new variant of an old question emerges: What is the effect of receiving contrasting evaluative feedback from two or more relevant audiences? Furthermore, when multiple evaluations of the same role-performance differ, how is the actor being evaluated likely to respond to the conflicting evaluations?