Just a compliment? The role of benevolent objectification in the work place

In the present work we'll analyse the changes in the work climate when workers are exposed to benevolent objectification and the changes in the work climate. First, we analysed the phenomenon of benevolent objectification, the concept of sexual harassment, and observed the consequences in the workplace. Objectification is "when a person, typically a woman, is reduced to her sex appeal or sexuality for the use and pleasure of others. When people are perceived as sex objects, they are not seen as fully human, deserving of dignity and respect. Sexual objectification can be directed at anyone, but compared to men, objectification is disproportionately directed at women". Secondly, we continue to analyse the phenomenon of sexual harassment. It is defined as "unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature", it "may include offensive remarks about a person's sex" according to the EEOC website. Following the literature, we hypothesised: Firstly, we hypothesised that a compliment focused on a female worker's body made by a male colleague in the workplace in SOT would be perceived as problematic (sexually harassing, unwelcome, uncomfortable). Second, we hypothesised that the number of compliments would affect their perception: the more compliments focused on a female worker's body made by a male colleague in the workplace, the more likely they would be perceived as problematic and create a negative work climate. Thirdly, we hypothesised that a positive evaluation of compliments I would be related to general attitudes towards sexual harassment, gender role beliefs and feminist identity. We assumed that the potential moderators could be general attitudes towards sexual harassment, gender role beliefs and feminist identity. In our scenarios, people saw a fictional female worker, called Stefania, receive some compliments from some male colleagues during a working week. To conduct the analysis, we gave the participants a questionnaire. To test our hypothesis, we used linear regression to predict participants' perceptions of the events, the target's attributions, and the work climate in relation to the number of compliments received. We will also run some regressions to explore the potential moderating variables. We run a linear mixed model for each outcome variable. In the model we included the vignette as a random factor and we included the condition as the main predictor. When examining the moderators (sexist attitudes, gender role beliefs and feminist identity), each moderator was included in the model as a main effect and in traction with condition. We can conclude that people perceived the compliments as less pleasant when they were more and we saw that this was moderated by sexist attitudes, gender role beliefs and feminist identity. We observed that comments about the workplace tended to mitigate their effect as their frequency increased, so that people who started to perceive the behaviour as problematic tended to normalise, and people who started to see the comments as positive tended to perceive the compliments as less pleasant. We observed that compliments have an impact on the work climate especially when people have a high feminist identity and low levels of gender role beliefs and sexist attitudes. In conclusion, we can assume that the effect, however small, influences and changes the work climate.