Lookism Climate in Organizations: Construct Development and Validation of a Scale

Abstract

Research suggests that physically attractive employees receive myriad workplace and career advantages compared to less attractive employees. Despite calls for more attention to the role of organizational context in understanding this phenomenon, a theoretically grounded conceptualization of an employer's value for physically attractive employees and a method of measuring this aspect of the work environment is currently absent from the literature. In this study, we introduce the construct lookism climate, which reflects perceptions that a given work environment implicitly or explicitly values employee physical attractiveness. We develop and validate a measure of lookism climate using eight samples comprising 1,857 full-time employed adults in the United States and South Korea. We establish the psychometric properties and nomological network of the Lookism Climate Scale (LCS), including its factor structure, convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity, and measurement equivalence. We provide evidence that the LCS can be used as an assessment of an individual's perceptions of workplace climate as well as employees’ shared conceptualization of climate. We also offer narrative examples of employee experiences with lookism climate. The introduction of the construct lookism climate and the LCS provides a pathway for future researchers to develop a deeper understanding of how organizational context contributes to the “beauty premium” in the workplace.