Obesity and Gender in Service Jobs: The Importance of Warmth in Predicting Customer Satisfaction

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The incidence of obesity in the US workforce is increasing. Importantly, obese employees are often subject to stereotypes and differential treatment related to their weight. These biases may be further influenced by factors such as the employee’s gender and the specific nature of the job. Thus, we employ the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) to examine the multiplicative effects of weight and gender in a unique context – the service industry – where we argue that warmth is more salient than competence for customers in short service interactions. In support of our hypotheses, we found that weight and gender interact to influence warmth, such that obese women were rated as higher in warmth compared to non-obese women. Also, as hypothesized, perceptions of warmth predicted service satisfaction, whereas perceptions of competence did not. Similarly, we found that larger body size predicted increased perceptions of warmth which led to increased perceptions of service satisfaction for women but not for men, whereas these indirect effects through competence were not observed for either gender. We end with a discussion of the theoretical implications related to the SCM along with practical implications for service industry organizations and employees.