Organizational Stigma Research Articles

The Chinese version of the tendency to stigmatize epidemic diseases scale: a translation and validation study.

To translate the Tendency to Stigmatize Epidemics Diseases Scale (TSEDS) into Chinese and to evaluate its psychometric properties. Translation and cross-cultural adaptation using the Brislin translation model, and pre-testing to form a Chinese version of TSEDS. A total of 434 adults participated in the study and the TSEDS were measured using the critical ratio method, Pearson correlation analysis, retest reliability, content validity, structural validity, and concurrent validity. The Chinese version of the TSEDS scale contains 27 items in 5 dimensions, including structural stigma, perceived stigma, organizational stigma, internalized stigma, and social stigma. The average content validity index of the scale was 0.975. The goodness of fit index (χ2/df= 1.981, RMSEA = 0.067, CFI= 0.930, IFI = 0.931, TLI = 0.922) indicated a good model fit. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.962 and the dimensionality ranged from 0.882 to 0.928. The retest reliability was 0.912. The Chinese version of TSEDS has good reliability and validity, which can be used to assess the epidemiological stigma tendency of Chinese adults.

Organizational Stigma Formation

Organizational Stigma Formation

Mental Health Disorders, Organizational Stigma, and Health Service Utilization Among US Fire Investigators: A Cross-sectional Survey.

The aim of the study is to estimate in a sample of US fire investigators the (1) prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) risk, and mental health services use and (2) association between organizational stigma and mental health disorders. This is a cross-sectional study design used to administer between November 2023 and January 2024, a 35-item behavioral/mental health survey. Approximately 18.0% of fire investigators had GAD, 22.8% depression, and 18.2% PTSD risk. Organizational stigma about mental health disorders was reported by 53.3% of fire investigators. The most frequently used behavioral/mental health services were cognitive behavioral therapy (40.1%) and medication management (36.1%). Organizational stigma around reporting mental health disorders was significantly associated with PTSD risk (adjusted odds ratio = 5.25 [2.41-11.43]). Mental health disorders are present in the fire investigator workforce, and organizational stigma is associated with limited report of PTSD risk.

CSR communication & stigmatized industries: is inclusion and diversity becoming a means for stigma-washing? Six decades of literature review

This work aims to present an in depth literature review under the lens of three disciplines: Corporate Social Responsibility (from now on CSR) communications, stigmatized industries, and diversity and inclusion (D&I). Such review is supported by a bibliometric mapping software, SciMAT, developed by Cobo and colleagues (2011), at Universidad de Granada, Spain. A total of 8,942 papers on the three topics from 1963 to 2022 published in 98 leading journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports of the Web of Science have been examined. The aforementioned software has been used to identify the relevant studies to focus on a second in-depth qualitative individual scrutiny. Findings suggest that the use of D&I to mitigate organizational stigma has yet to be analyzed. One still needs to confirm or reject the proposition that stigmatized firms use CSR communication and D&I to mitigate their stigma. Furthermore, they indicate that if future studies may find that stigmatized companies utilize D&I to manage their stigma via CSR communication, the D&I discipline would suffer from this practice, since one would prove that D&I is instrumentally used in a different way than it is supposed to.

Is workplace mental health stigma associated with managers’ prevention of employee’s sick-leave?

Abstract Common Mental Disorders (CMDs) are a common cause for sick-leave. CMDs carry stigma and it has been argued that stigma impairs support in the workplace. Earlier research has investigated managers’ personal stigma towards CMDs, but insight into contextual stigma at work, and its importance for sick-leave prevention is lacking. We investigated personal stigma and three layers of contextual stigma (employee, collegial, organizational) and its association with managers’ possibility to take different types of actions to prevent sick-leave. 2,769 Swedish managers from the private sector partook in a survey. Personal stigma was measured with an established scale that was supplemented with four additional items capturing contextual stigma. The managers’ possibility to prevent sick-leave regarding 20 possible preventive actions was assessed using a video vignette design. Principal component analysis revealed three types of actions: ‘Actions to adapt tasks and setting', ‘Actions to involve experts', and ‘Social support actions'. Multiple linear regression analyses were done with the layers of stigma as independent variables for each of the three types of actions, adjusted for co-variates. Personal stigma was significantly associated with the possibility for all types of actions (p<.001). Collegial and organizational stigma was associated with the possibility for ‘Actions to adapt tasks and setting’ (p<.001). Collegial stigma was associated with the possibility for ‘Actions to involve experts’ (p<.001). All contextual stigma variables were associated with the possibility for ‘Social support actions’ (p<.01). More workplace stigma was associated to lower possibility to take action. Personal and contextual stigma were associated with less possibilities for managers to prevent sick-leave in relation to the vignette case. This calls for greater awareness for mental health stigma in workplaces and how stigma can impair sick-leave prevention. Key messages • Workplace mental health stigma consists of personal, employee, collegial, and organizational stigma. Managers can take three types of actions: adapt tasks and settings, involve experts, and support. • More workplace mental health stigma is associated to lower possibility for managers to take action to prevent sick-leave.

Correction to “Organizational Stigma: Taking Stock and Opening New Areas for Research”

Correction to “Organizational Stigma: Taking Stock and Opening New Areas for Research”

Organizational Stigma, Corporate Lobbying, and the Nonmarket Boundaries of the Firm

Organizational Stigma, Corporate Lobbying, and the Nonmarket Boundaries of the Firm

Dissecting Organizational Stigma: Does the Market Punish the Innocent?

Dissecting Organizational Stigma: Does the Market Punish the Innocent?

Period Power: Organizational Stigma, Multimodality, and Social Entrepreneurship in the Menstrual Products Industry

AbstractIn this article, we contribute to the recent direction in the organizational stigma literature that focuses on stigma as providing opportunities for organizations. Drawing on a qualitative abductive study of 90 social enterprises in the menstrual products industry, we extend the literature by showing how the organizational form of social enterprises allows them to put the societal issue of menstruation stigma at the core of their ventures. Specifically, we find that these social enterprises take a disruptive strategy, and we elaborate on the tactics of normalization and moralization on which they draw by highlighting the essential role of multimodality in the process of destigmatizing menstruation. In light of the tabooed nature of menstruation, this multimodal approach is key to challenging existing hidden, taken‐for‐granted norms around menstruation and supplanting them with alternative ones. Our study has important implications for the literatures on organizational stigma, social enterprises, and multimodality and points to their strong conceptual complementarity for understanding processes of societal change.

Amplifying Stigmatization: Owlcatraz and the naming of a football stadium

While organizational stigma has emerged as an important and vibrant area of study, yet the processes of stigmatization have not been as thoroughly examined. Specifically, this study explores the subsequent, ongoing stigmatization processes beyond stigma emergence that are triggered by stigma transfer. To do so, we draw on a qualitative case study of an American university selling the naming rights of its newly built football stadium to a company that runs for-profit prisons with a history of human rights violations. We find that the stigma transfer through an exposed association can lead to amplifying stigmatization of both the source and target organizations, featuring a reverberation process fueled by both rhetorical and material stigmatizing practices. Even after the stigmatizing association ceased, stigmatization of the target organization, though muffled, lingered and required further management. Through developing a model of amplifying and muffling stigmatization after stigma transfer, we offer contributions to scholarship on ongoing stigmatization and stigma transfer. We also open the opportunity to understand the temporal dimensions of stigmatization.

Dissecting Organizational Stigma: The Case of Lehman 'Orphans'

Dissecting Organizational Stigma: The Case of Lehman 'Orphans'

Organizational Stigma: Taking Stock and Opening New Areas for Research

AbstractSince its introduction as a concept, organizational stigma has become central to explaining how organizations or industries become tainted, and how they overcome and manage such taint. In this introduction to the Special Issue on organizational stigma, we start by exploring the origins of the concept, providing basic definitions and reviewing the existing research on stigmatization, stigma transfer and experienced stigma. The papers in this issue flesh out our understanding of what causes organizational stigma and its implications at different levels. The remainder of this introduction takes stock of this recent work to explore future research opportunities around the micro‐ and macro‐foundations of organizational stigma, the links with scandals, controversies and other negative social evaluations and research methods. As the concept of organizational stigma reaches a new stage, we argue that its explanatory power can be harnessed to explore new and increasingly relevant phenomena and contexts.

Stigma as Moral Insurance: How Stigma Buffers Firms from the Market Consequences of Greenwashing

AbstractOrganizational stigma is widely assumed to be a serious liability. However, a small body of research has begun to show that stigma can also lead to positive outcomes. A core assumption of this budding literature is that realizing a benefit from stigma requires firms to take active and strategic measures to turn stigma to their advantage. Shedding new light on this assumption, in the present research we show that stigma has a built‐in insurance‐like quality that buffers firms from the market consequences of their misconduct. Specifically, we demonstrate that when firms are caught greenwashing, organizational stigma protects them from consumer backlash, with no effort required on their part to realize this benefit. Across a longitudinal panel data study tracking 7365 firms in 47 countries over a 15‐year period, plus an experiment, we show that stigmatized firms are subjected to less market discipline for greenwashing. We further demonstrate that the mechanism driving this phenomenon is a certain ‘boys will be boys’ expectation by consumers that stigmatized firms lack integrity and, by consequence, are given greater leeway to greenwash. In so doing, we move beyond prior research focusing on the strategies firms can deploy to leverage stigma to their advantage, highlighting instead the psychological mechanisms that make organizational stigma more than a liability to be overcome in the marketplace, but also an asset.

Not on Skid Row: Stigma Management in Addiction Treatment Organizations

AbstractWe respond to a paucity of organizational scholarship considering how organizations manage their clientele's stigma as opposed to their own through studying the discursive stigma management efforts of addiction treatment organizations (ATOs). In studying the discursive stigma management of ATOs on behalf of their potential clientele, we offer some initial tactics organizations might use to reconstruct the stigma associated with fulfilling their mission. As a function of pursuing their missions, ATOs must elicit those with substance use disorder (SUD), who have largely concealable stigmas, to seek treatment from the organization. While not sharing the same stigma, reputable ATOs thus find themselves in the position of managing stigma on the behalf of their potential clientele. Analysing texts and images of three prominent US ATOs, we found the organizations managed stigma through discursive tactics directed at encouraging potential clientele's engagement. We contribute to the literature on organizational stigma management through (1) exploring the discursive tactics and strategies used by organizations to manage stigma attributed to their clientele, (2) exploring the role of constructing provisional selves in managing stigma, and (3) considering how neutralizing negative provisional selves is an important part of managing the stigma of potential clientele.

"Should I Tell My Leader or Not?"-Health-Oriented Leadership and Stigma as Antecedents of Employees' Mental Health Information Disclosure Intentions at Work.

To investigate how health-oriented leadership and stigma facilitate or impede employees' disclosure intentions to leaders. In two studies-an experimental vignette (n = 73) and a cross-sectional study (n = 220)-we manipulated or measured health-oriented leadership, transformational leadership, and organizational stigma and compared different reasons for disclosure (mental health problems and severe error) to separate general and specific disclosure decisions. Health-oriented leadership fostered disclosure above and beyond transformational leadership. High organizational stigma was associated with lower disclosure. Health-oriented leadership had a stronger effect on disclosing mental problems than on disclosing a severe error and slightly mitigated the negative relationship between stigma and disclosure in study 1. Findings were not influenced by employees' current mental health status. Our findings highlight the importance of health-oriented leadership as a facilitator and organizational stigma as a barrier to disclosure intentions.

Organizational Stigma and the Practice and Meaning of Work: When Work Becomes Dirty

Beyond the secondary stigmatization thesis—that organizational members in stigmatized organizations can themselves experience stigmatization—we know little about how organizational stigma affects the internal lives of organizations. Where organizations are stigmatized due to events, blameworthiness has been offered as an explanation for why stigma transfers initially to the organizational leadership—for example, top executives. We examine the existing literature’s assumptions about the transfer of stigma in an event-stigmatized organization by inductively exploring how event stigma impacts group relations and work. Our research context is a public broadcasting company that became stigmatized when it lost its journalistic independence. We find that what has been depicted as an intrinsic “transfer” of stigma to responsible units in event-stigmatized organizations is in fact highly contentious, with groups vying against one another to exert control over the practice of journalism in the hopes of implementing their own vision. The internal struggle fundamentally transformed the practice and meaning of work in the journalism units of this organization, turning the work into something “dirty” for some workers. Our findings contribute to the understanding of organizational stigma as a contested phenomenon in contrast to its earlier conceptualization as a relatively stable category, and to the understanding of the conditions under which the practice and meaning of work can be transformed in event-stigmatized organizations.

Audience Diversity and the Transfer of Stigma: Evidence from the U.S. Luxury Hotel

Recent developments in the field of organizational stigma suggest that moral transgressions by an organizational actor can elicit stigma and thereby affect the way evaluators perceive organizations that appear somewhat similar or associated to the transgressing actor. However, this line of research assumes that evaluators share a unified assessment about the stigmatized organizational actor and attribute the same degree of stigma to other organizations that appear to be related or associated with the stigmatized one. To shed light in this direction, this study aims at exploring the role of diversity among evaluators and its impact on evaluators’ attribution of stigma to organizations. Building on a dataset comprising over 20.000 guests’ reviews of 129 luxury hotels in major U.S. cities and modelling Trump’s election as president of the United States as an exogeneous shock to the industry, we find that not only more negative ratings negative words are attributed to luxury hotels after the elections but also the evaluating population changed in regards of its demographical characteristics due to the transgression of having elected a President who was often associated with travel-bans and unwelcoming comments, and which violated the ideal of hospitality. Our results further show that because the reviewer population changed, stigma is attributed differently to Trump-associated hotels.

Understanding Event Stigma: A Configurational Approach

Stigma is not fair. While some firms get permanently stigmatized, others emerge untarnished by the same or a similar event. However, such unfairness may not necessarily be a bad thing for firms. This study claims that repeated media coverage of a negative event over time is symptomatic of organizational stigma, and pathways exist to encourage the development or avoidance of this stigma. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, I navigate the configurations of stigma for an event of corporate social irresponsibility in the global supply chain. The findings of the study suggest the confluence of multiple factors around a stigmatizing event, the media and the firm on stigmatization of a negative event. Most importantly, to effectively avoid stigma, the firm’s immediate response to a negative incident should be strategically directed based on the understanding of the other factors. The main purpose of this study is to address a gap in the event stigma literature where there is a paucity of research on what contributes to its development. This study has important implications for practitioners as it offers concrete suggestions on how to avert event stigma.

Stick Together or Break Apart? Stigmatizing Adverse Events and Unplanned Alliance Dissolution

Our paper contributes to the emerging research on event-based explanations of alliance instability by conceptually linking theories of organizational stigma, status, and corporate governance to explain unplanned alliance dissolution. Our empirical study of alliance dissolutions by publicly traded US firms operating in the passenger air transportation industry in 1985-2016 confirms our prediction that (a) stigmatizing events affect alliance instability indirectly; (b) the extent of a firm’s external corporate governance exacerbates positive effect of high stigma events on media vilification of a firm but attenuates negative effect of media vilification on the probability of unplanned alliance dissolution; (c) firm status has a penalizing effect when high stigma events occur. However, contrary to our predictions, firm status loses its buffering power when media vilification intensifies.

Organizational Event Stigma: Typology, Processes, and Stickiness

Organizational Event Stigma: Typology, Processes, and Stickiness