Enduring, Strategizing, and Rising Above: Workplace Dignity Threats and Responses Across Job Levels

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-15-2024

Department

Management

Abstract

Despite a growing body of literature focused on understanding experiences of workplace dignity, attention has centered almost exclusively on employees with lower-level jobs. As a result, little is known about how workplace dignity and indignity are experienced by employees with middle- and upper-level jobs and how their experiences differ from those with lower-level jobs. We address these absences by interviewing employees from a diversity of lower-, middle-, and upper-level jobs about their experiences of indignity at work. We outline common dignity threats, along with typical emotional responses and recourses employees use at each level. We find lower-level employees experience chronic dignity threats from being disrespected, devalued, demeaned, and dehumanized, to which their most typical response is endurance. Middle-level employees experience periodic dignity threats due to undermining of their work, confidence, and reputation. For them, the typical response is strategizing. Finally, on the rare occasions upper-level employees experience dignity threats, it usually is due to a disregard of their special expertise or denial of special rights, to which they respond by rising above.

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Original Publication Information

Tilton, J., Lucas, K., Kish-Gephart, J.J. et al. Enduring, Strategizing, and Rising Above: Workplace Dignity Threats and Responses Across Job Levels. J Bus Ethics (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05672-5.

DOI

10.1007/s10551-024-05672-5

ORCID

0000-0003-1645-6603

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