Understanding the sources and consequences of dignity threats for members of lower social classes

Abstract

Organizations are one of the primary mediums that influence an individual’s dignity. For some, organizations provide an opportunity to attain and maintain dignity through achievement and positive interactions. For others, organizations stand to impede the attainment or threaten the maintenance of dignity. While all employees have positive and negative experiences of dignity in the workplace, this paper analyzes how employees in lower social classes stand to disproportionately experience dignity threats as a result of stigma imported into organizations and the conditions and structure within the organization. Extant research on dignity has rarely considered social class explicitly (for an exception, see Crowley, 2014). By integrating these two topics, our goal is to shed light on this relatively invisible force of inequality within organizations and provide a more comprehensive understanding of the sources and consequences of dignity threats for this segment of the workforce.