A Tale of Two Offices: The Socioeconomic Environment’s Effect on Job Performance While Working From Home
基于304名美国远程工作者的数据，研究发现居家办公环境中的社会经济地位信号通过影响个人控制感，进而影响感知工作绩效，且居家时间越长效应越强，揭示了疫情下不平等的新机制。
In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses closed their offices and asked their employees to work from home. The transition to remote work has yielded performance gains for many companies; so much so that many firms are planning to continue to use remote work after the pandemic subsides. Nevertheless, such benefits may not be distributed equally throughout the workforce. Drawing on the sociocognitive theory of socioeconomic status (SES), we predict that one’s home working environment features salient signals of their social status that affect their performance. Based on a sample of 304 remote workers from within the United States collected during the COVID-19 shutdown, we find that individuals whose home offices connote higher levels of SES report a greater sense of control over their environment, which ultimately is associated with higher levels of perceived job performance. Furthermore, we find that the more time an individual spends in their home office, the stronger the relationship between their environment-based SES and their personal sense of control. Taken as a whole, our findings suggest that because home working environments are arrayed along an SES gradient, they present another mechanism by which pre-existing inequalities may be made salient as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.