外刊阅读20240418｜企业制服的利与弊

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A study by Robert Smith of Tilburg University and his colleagues asked people to imagine being on the receiving end of poor service when picking up a pizza. They were then shown pictures of uniformed or non-uniformed employees; the person who had notionally treated them badly was circled . Participants were more likely to blame the company than the individual or the circumstances for a bad experience when a uniform was involved. If corporate clothing makes each worker seem more representative of their employers, the authors suggest that it may be a good idea not to give it to inexperienced workers.

Uniforms can also affect the psychology of employees. In 2012 Hajo Adam, now of the University of Bath, and Adam Galinsky, now of Columbia Business School, coined the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the effect that specific clothes have on the way that people think and feel. Questions have been raised over the validity of enclothed cognition, but a new meta-analysis by Messrs Adam and Galinsky, along with Carl Blaine Horton of Columbia Business School, concludes that the phenomenon is real.

In one study Guillaume Pech of Université Libre de Bruxelles and Emilie Caspar of Ghent University gave participants the option to administer electric shocks to other people in return for money; those dressed up in Red Cross uniforms showed more empathy than those in normal outfits . Xuehua Wang of Asia Europe Business School and her co-authors found that formal clothes made people more likely to make healthy eating choices. According to a paper by Saaid Mendoza of Providence College and Elizabeth Parks-Stamm of University of Southern Maine, people who wore a police uniform during a video-game simulation designed to test reaction times were more likely than those in their own clothes to shoot unarmed targets. Clothes maketh the bang .

The effects that uniforms have on workers will obviously vary. A uniform that confers a sense of professional identity—a doctor's white coat, say—is likely to be more motivating than one that does not. People will be happier to be a corporate billboard if they feel pride in their employer. Some work clothing looks good and some of it is a paean to polyester : you do not so much represent a brand as a fire hazard. Some uniforms are comfortable and some are not, with women usually getting the worst of it. Only in 2023 were female police officers in Britain issued with body armour made to suit their anatomy .