Asia School of Business

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Invisible Inequalities: Socioeconomic Disadvantages Affect Perception, Personality, and Motivation

Michael Thomas Ford, Yi-Ren Wang, Michael Frese, Jun Won Park, Na Krystal Zhao, Michael W Kraus, Jared Nai, Marko Pitesa

Macro-level changes such as globalization and outsourcing have motivated employers to search for more flexibility in their relationships with employees, increasing the prevalence of nonstandard, low-wage, or precarious employment (Kalleberg, 2009). It is now more crucial than ever that organizations and society understand how socioeconomic disadvantage influences the way workers think and behave. Research suggests that socioeconomic disadvantages such as low-income levels, low socioeconomic status, and precarious work arrangements can affect workers’ perceptions, motivation, and behavioral patterns in ways that decrease others’ judgment of their performance and promotability, further exacerbating pre-existing inequalities (e.g., Meuris & Leana, 2015; Pitesa & Pillutla, 2019; Wang & Ford, 2020). More notable is that inequality associated with one’s socioeconomic status is often invisible to others at work (Bapuji et al., 2020), and both theory and practices targeting socioeconomically disadvantaged workers have been understudied and delayed. The invisibility of socioeconomic status may also lead some to neglect the situational burdens on workers, resulting in their disadvantageous outcomes and reinforcing the inequality stratified by workers’ socioeconomic disadvantages. This symposium aims to make such invisible inequalities more visible, with particular attention to how socioeconomic disadvantages affect the ways workers think and act. To this end, three research papers are assembled, each illuminating the effect of socioeconomic environment on individuals’ perceptions, judgment, personality, and behavioral patterns. Findings from these studies altogether shed important light on the mechanisms that maintain and reinforce workplace inequality and act as invisible barriers to workplace inclusion.