Preregistration for 'Would you like to work with me? Workers’ evaluations of co-workability and competence for speakers with different accents'

Over the past decade, there is an increasing spotlight on the importance of diversity in the workplace, especially in Singapore (DeLancey, 2013; Goswami & Rangaswamy, 2019; Joseph & Selvaraj, 2015). While diversity in the workplace has been known to have a positive effect as it increases creativity and innovation, it also has negative consequences such as increasing conflicts and reduced cohesiveness due to reasons such as communication (Bassett-Jones, 2005; Roberge & van Dick, 2010). This study will compare the effect of different status of accents (in terms of SES) on the listener’s desire of wanting to work with the speaker and the listener’s evaluation on the speaker’s ability and competence of their tasks, in terms of two constructs: perceived co-workability and perceived competence. Non-native accents have been known to affect ones’ perception of another’s competence (Nelson, Signorella & Botti, 2016). It is predicted that a general worker would prefer to work with someone which represents a higher education and white-collar productivity, especially in an office context. This study will compare workers' evaluations of pre-prepared scripts, read aloud by speakers with different Asian accents from higher and lower SES countries in the region.