Complementary work in the hospital: How infection preventionists perceive opportunities for cooperation with higher status physicians

Social scientists and management scholars have tended to see workplace interaction through the lens of hierarchy. However, modern workplaces include many people who do not fit neatly into such hierarchies because their work is designed to assess, support, sanction, or monitor other workers who already have well-established positions. Motivated by this observation, we conducted interviews with 193 infection preventionists—healthcare workers whose job it is to work with higher status physicians to monitor and suppress healthcare-acquired infections—to assess how workers outside of existing hierarchies can integrate their work. Inductive analyses of these interviews suggest three strategies: deference; relying on bureaucracy’s routines and practices; and recruiting higher status confederates, which we call side-channeling. From these analyses, we introduce the concept of complementary work to describe labor that seeks to supplement existing workplace hierarchies.