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

Jacqueline Tilton, Kristen Lucas, Jennifer J. Kish-Gephart, Justin K. Kent

Journal of Business Ethics · 2024 · Volume 195 · Issue 2

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.

Keywords

Dignity, Diversity, Humanistic management, Inequality, Occupations

Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.