IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-00980265.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

It Pays to Be Herr Kaiser Germans With Noble-Sounding Surnames More Often Work as Managers Than as Employees

Author

Listed:
  • Raphael Silberzahn

    (Judge Business School - CAM - University of Cambridge [UK])

  • Eric Luis Uhlmann

    (GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

In the field study reported here (N = 222,924), we found that Germans with noble-sounding surnames, such as Kaiser ("emperor"), König ("king"), and Fürst ("prince"), more frequently hold managerial positions than Germans with last names that either refer to common everyday occupations, such as Koch ("cook"), Bauer ("farmer"), and Becker/Bäcker ("baker"), or do not refer to any social role. This phenomenon occurs despite the fact that noble-sounding surnames never indicated that the person actually held a noble title. Because of basic properties of associative cognition, the status linked to a name may spill over to its bearer and influence his or her occupational outcomes.

Suggested Citation

  • Raphael Silberzahn & Eric Luis Uhlmann, 2013. "It Pays to Be Herr Kaiser Germans With Noble-Sounding Surnames More Often Work as Managers Than as Employees," Post-Print hal-00980265, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00980265
    DOI: 10.1177/0956797613494851
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Frank D. Hodge & Kim I. Mendoza & Roshan K. Sinha, 2021. "The Effect of Humanizing Robo‐Advisors on Investor Judgments," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 38(1), pages 770-792, March.
    2. Gary A. Hoover & Christian Hopp, 2017. "What Crisis? Taking Stock of Management Researchers' Experiences with and Views of Scholarly Misconduct," CESifo Working Paper Series 6611, CESifo.
    3. Filip Gesiarz & Jan-Emmanuel De Neve & Tali Sharot, 2020. "The motivational cost of inequality: Opportunity gaps reduce the willingness to work," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(9), pages 1-18, September.
    4. Massimo Baldini & Andrea Barigazzi, 2023. "Surnames in local newspapers and social mobility," Center for the Analysis of Public Policies (CAPP) 0181, Universita di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Dipartimento di Economia "Marco Biagi".

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00980265. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.