| Popis: |
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is forcing more and more people to work from home. As part of this remote work, businesses increasingly rely on video-based teleconferences to coordinate among their employees, managers, and clients. For instance, Zoom calls have become a fixture of the remote workers daily life. In March 2020, during one of the earliest peaks of the pandemic, Zoom reported 200 million daily meeting participants compared to just 4 million in December 2019 (Iqbal, 2020). In just one month that number soared to 300 million. Although these remote meetings appear to be essential for many businesses, they may inadvertently lead to new mechanisms of inequality within the virtual workplace. In particular, video-based teleconferences put our personal home offices on display for other stakeholders and may reveal more about our identities than some would prefer. That is, we often select artifacts that represent the things we care about (Elsbach, 2004; Elsbach & Pratt, 2007) and leave behind behavioral residues from our time spent in these home offices (Gosling, Ko, Mannarelli, & Morris, 2002). In fact, prior work has suggested that people readily ascribe status to different office settings (Elsbach, 2004) and draw inferences of status from home furnishing (Dittmar, 1992). These environments may especially potent signals because they are relatively fixed and enduring (i.e., we do not readily alter our physical environments compared to other material-based status cues, like clothing) (Elsbach & Pratt, 2007). When this window into our personal status is opened, it can lead others to form important, non-ignorable inferences about us. Prior studies of class-based cues have consistently found that individuals perceived to occupy positions of lower socioeconomic status (SES) are viewed as less competent (e.g., intelligent, skillful, capable) and less warm (e.g., friendly, well-intentioned) (Bjornsdottir & Rule, 2017; Callaghan, Delgadillo, & Kraus, 2019; Kraus, Torrez, Park, & Ghayebi, in press). There is also evidence to suggest that lower SES individuals are more apt to be pitied, while those who are seen as rich (i.e., higher SES) are more likely to be envied (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2007; Fiske, 2010). Ultimately, these perceptions should inform one's behavior. For instance, perceptions of competence and warmth are regularly associated with one's likelihood of being hired and the starting salary they will be offered (Kraus et al., in press). Thus, we suspect that who people will be more likely to nominate others to positions of leadership if that person's office connotes a higher position of SES (i.e., environment-based SES) and this effect should be mediated by interpersonal perceptions of competence and warmth. |
