A window into your status: Environment-based social class’s effect on virtual leadership

Abstract

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, videoconferencing has become a prominent aspect of many daily work routines. Despite the benefits of this development, scholars have argued that research should consider how trends that emerged during the pandemic may exacerbate pre-existing inequalities. As such, we draw upon evolutionary signaling theory to examine how videoconferencing technology may inadvertently signal one’s social class position, affect judgments of informal leadership and follower performance, and become mechanisms of inequality in the workforce. Through an initial field study (Study 1), our results suggest that people’s home working environments feature various signals that correspond with their social class position. Our subsequent experimental studies (Studies 2 and 3) and meta-analytic summary show that once a window is opened into an employee's home environment, it can lead others to form inferences about their competence, which affects the likelihood that they emerge as a leader and followers’ task performance. Extending evolutionary signaling theory, results show that participants were influenced by the environment-based social class signals even when they knew these were fake, virtual backgrounds. Thus, these subtle environment-based social class signals reflect novel pathways to inequality that likely are relevant as virtual leadership and videoconferencing become part of the “new normal”.