Cross-Class Friendships Help: The Effect of Social Class Background on Performance and Promotability

Workers coming from lower social class backgrounds are disadvantaged in terms of long-term career success in higher-status occupations even when they attain a high level of education and work competence, an issue known as the “class ceiling.” To better understand this phenomenon, we integrate research on cultural mismatch theory and newcomer adjustment to examine the cultural obstacles experienced by newcomers from lower social class backgrounds when they enter middle-class workplaces. In a time-lagged multisource field study, we find that newcomers from lower social class backgrounds experience a lower level of person-organization (PO) fit than their counterparts from higher social class backgrounds, and subsequently are rated lower on task performance and promotability by supervisors (Study 1). Furthermore, cross-class friendships moderate this indirect effect, such that the positive relationship between social class background and PO fit is attenuated when cross-class friendships are present as opposed to absent (Study 2). We find support for our explanation that class achievement gaps (measured as task performance and promotability) emerge as a function of newcomer PO fit. We discuss how our findings broaden the understanding of the sources of the class ceiling and how these findings inform novel potential solutions for this issue.