We investigate the effectiveness of status as a means of enabling players to coordinate on socially superior outcomes despite having conflicting individual interests. Theoretically, we illustrate how an exogenous and arbitrary status ordering, ranking all members of a social group from high to low, permits coordination on an efficient -- yet fragile -- equilibrium if and only if the social group reaches a consensus on the appropriate compensation for conceding the privilege of high status to another player. We further analyse the conditions under which non-coercive transfer institutions help reaching such consensus. Experimentally, we find the availability of status to lift coordination clearly above the mixed equilibrium. And yet, coordination falls significantly short of the efficient status equilibrium due to (i) substantial under-investment into compensation, and (ii) a surprising reluctance of middle ranks (rather than low ranks) to concede.