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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The IRB-approved protocol for this study stipulated that transcripts would be privately stored to protect the identity of participants. Therefore, supporting data is not publicly available.
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Appendix
Appendix
Interview protocol top-level questions.
1. Please start by telling us a little about your current job. |
2. I want you to think of a time at work in your current role when you felt as though you were being treated with dignity. What was that experience? |
3. Now, I want you to think of a time while working in your current role when you felt as though you were not being treated with dignity. Please describe that experience. How did you respond? |
4. Please tell us about an occasion or situation in your current role at this organization where, looking back, you realized that you may have treated someone without much dignity. |
5. In your current role, who has the greatest impact on your dignity on a day-to-day basis (boss, coworkers, someone else)? Why and in what ways? |
6. Dignity tends to be one of these terms that everyone understands, but also that everyone experiences uniquely. What does dignity mean to you personally? |
7. What do you wish other people understood about your dignity at work? |
8. In light of our interest in understanding how you experience dignity at work and in your current role at this company, do you think there is anything that I should have asked you that I did not? |
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05672-5