Inside the Stigma Panzer: Organizational Members’ Emotional Work in Response to Organizational Event

Abstract

We investigate how organizational members manage their emotional experiences of organizational event stigma as an implication of organizational wrongdoing. Our research is based on a longitudinal case study of Best Bank, that has been involved in a money laundering scandal of historical magnitude. Our study of organizational members shows how their pride and organizational loyalty makes them develop a ‘stigma panzer’, i.e. a number of emotional responses when at work as well as at home, that serves to protect them against the negative implications of the event stigmatization. We show how the stigma panzer may benefit the individual employee facing the event stigma at work, while we question if this emotional stigma panzer at home is also beneficial for the organization. We conclude by calling for more stigma research to understand better the implications of emotions at work and at home for organizational stigma related to organizational wrongdoing.