Wearing Your Worth at Work: The Consequences of Employees’ Daily Clothing Choices

Abstract

Do the clothes worn to work impact employees’ thoughts and behaviors? Despite the universal necessity of wearing clothes and the fact that employees make decisions about this daily, organizational scholars have not yet addressed this question. We integrated sociometer and enclothed cognition theories to propose that aspects of clothing—their aesthetics, conformity, and uniqueness—hold symbolic meanings that have implications for employees’ state self-esteem and subsequent task and relational behaviors (i.e., goal progress, social avoidance). We first provide evidence for the nature of the symbolic meanings associated with these three dimensions of work clothing in a set of within-person experimental studies. Then, the results of a 10-day field study of employees from four organizations generally supported our predictions, showing that daily clothing aesthetics and uniqueness had effects on state self-esteem and downstream behavioral consequences. The effects of daily clothing conformity emerged under the condition of greater interaction frequency with others in the workplace. Our manuscript contributes to both major theories from which we draw and further offers theoretical and practical contributions to the literature on organizational clothing.