직장여성의 외모가 승진에 미치는 영향 -자아존중감과 대인관계수준의 매개역할을 중심으로-

Recently there have been efforts to develop linkages between some of major lines of work in status characteristics theory(SCT) and personal traits, especially physical attractiveness. For example, there seems to be a societal impression that pretty women are more successful in workplace. So, in our country working women have become increasingly concerned about their physical attractiveness, Since it is assumed that they will need physical attractiveness and it will be up to the individual to adjust her behavior in order to obtain a job or promotion, to develop a career and to increase her confidence. It is also known that physical attractiveness influences on worker’s hiring, promotion, earings, and interpersonal relations significantly. The purpose of this study is to prove that physical attractiveness of women employees influences on their career success, and that self-esteem and interpersonal relations have a mediating role between physical attractiveness and promotion by test of the hypotheses - working women’s self satisfaction of physical attractiveness will be related to promotion positively and this relationship will be mediated by their self-esteems and interpersonal relation skills. We hypothesized the following and the following hypotheses were divided into several sub-hypothesis to facilitate assessment. - Physical attractiveness(face and fatness) and status characteristic(age) will be significantly correlated with self-esteem, interpersonal relation skill, and promotion. - Self-esteem and interpersonal relation will be significantly correlated with promotion. - Self-esteem and interpersonal relations will mediate the relationship between face, fatness, and age and promotion in female employees. In order to achieve our research purpose, literature review and survey research technique were conducted. To identify all possible studies of the relationships between physical attractiveness and various criteria that indicate the satisfaction with promotion(self-esteem, interpersonal relation skill), several databases were searched in the process of our model identification. In addition to the questionnaire searches, the reference lists of reviews of the literature were examined. These efforts of searches resulted in our equation model specification. Most articles contained correlations or information that could be translated into correlations. And the data obtained from 188 female workers who are working in divers organizations in the Seoul metropolitan area are analyzed with the statistical program AMOS 4.0 and SPSS 12.0K for Windows. Structural equation modeling which is not traditional analysis method was used in analyzing hypotheses considering debates regarding methodological rigorousness in current researches field in status characteristics theory or status performance expectation states theory. The result of the empirical analysis are as follows; as early organizational study observed, female worker’s self satisfaction of physical attractiveness is related to satisfaction with promotion positively and this relationship is mediated by self-esteem and satisfaction with interpersonal relations. Path analysis showed that the interrelation of physical attractiveness, self-esteem and interpersonal relations and their relation with promotion are explained to a certain degree by the proposed model. Though this study contributed both academically and practically, it has some limitations, Assessment on variables was done by direct reports of the respondents, for example, which the objective level of the physical attractiveness and promotion can be different compared with respondents’ self assessment. So our process of model verification is not free from the common methode variance problem. Theoretically, it is important to understand how and why physical attractiveness affects working women’s success in the aspect of promotion in business organization. Practically, it is important for managers to know whether physical status of employees affects performance because it proxies self-esteem and excellent interpersonal relation skill or wether their physical attractiveness acts independently of these processes. The results presented in this article clearly suggest that physical attractiveness affects employee’s self-esteem and workplace interactions and therefore is worthy of continued scholarly investigation.