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The role of social comparison as a means by which employees gather information about their role in organizations has become of significant importance to both researchers and practitioners over the last 50 years since Festinger proposed his theory of social comparison ([11] Festinger, 1954; [15] Goodman, 1977). Of growing interest among social comparison researchers has been the role of errors in social comparison at work. This has become an important topic primarily because social comparison is seen as a mechanism by which employees can reduce ambiguity and gain information in organizational settings ([11] Festinger, 1954; [15] Goodman, 1977; [35] Kihlstrom and Klein, 1994; [37] Kulik and Ambrose, 1992). However, if the processes underlying social comparison are faulty, the information obtained may be faulty as well. While researchers have begun to explore the role of social comparison errors in organizational behavior, there has been a distinct lack of theory to help guide investigations of when, why, and how these errors occur in organizational contexts. In this paper, we develop an organizational theory for pluralistic ignorance, a social comparison error with important implications for both managers and researchers due to its influence at multiple levels of organizations.
Pluralistic ignorance is defined as a situation in which an individual holds an opinion, but mistakenly believes that the majority of his or her peers hold the opposite opinion ([1] Allport, 1924, [2] 1933; [32] Katz and Allport, 1931, [54] Prentice and Miller, 1996, 2002)[1] . Basically, pluralistic ignorance involves two social cognitive errors ([51] O'Gorman, 1988). The first error is a social comparison error whereby individuals mistakenly believe that others hold an opinion opposite to their own. The second, related error is the mistaken belief that the individual can accurately assess the opinions of others. Taken together, we see that the individual believes his or her opinions differ from those of others (the social comparison error) and he or she is quite confident in that perceived difference (the accuracy error).
Pluralistic ignorance is consistent with other social comparison errors including false consensus and false uniqueness ([28] Harvey et al. , 2001; [54] Prentice and Miller, 1996). (See [42] Miller and McFarland (1991) for a more lengthy discussion of how social comparison errors differ.) It differs in the type...