Service employees and self-verification: The roles of occupational stigma consciousness and core self-evaluations

Abstract

Despite the growing number and importance of service occupations, we know little about how jobholders’ perceptions of societal stigmas of service jobs influence their identification with and attitudes towards work. The present study presents a framework that accords key roles to research on occupational stigma consciousness and the verification of employees’ self-views (i.e. core self-evaluations) to understand employees’ responses to occupational stigmatization. Survey responses from call center employees revealed a negative relationship between occupational stigma consciousness and occupational identification and work meaningfulness and a positive relationship between occupational stigma consciousness and organizational production deviant behaviors for employees who have a positive self-view. Opposite patterns of results surfaced for employees who have a lower positive self-view.

Bad bosses and self‐verification: The moderating role of core self‐evaluations with trust in workplace management

“…When others' treatment, feedback, or experiences are not aligned with individuals' self-views, self-verification theory predicts they feel uncertainty, a loss of control, and personally threatened. As a result, individuals whose self-views are challenged tend to behave defensively (Croyle, Sun, & Hart, 1997) and aggressively (e.g., Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996), report lower levels of well-being (e.g., Frone, Russell, & Cooper, 1995) and less-positive attitudes toward their job and organization (e.g., Shantz & Booth, 2014;Wiesenfeld et al, 2007).…”

“…The self-view can be represented by a person's CSE (e.g., Shantz & Booth, 2014), a higher-order dispositional framework representing the fundamental evaluations people make about themselves and their functioning in the world (Judge, Locke, & Durham, 1997). Individuals high in CSE are confident, well adjusted, efficacious, and bring a positive frame to situations.…”

Age as double‐edged sword among victims of customer mistreatment: A self‐esteem threat perspective

“…Scholars suggest that service workers experience customer mistreatment as a blow to the ego or a threat to their self-esteem, which impacts service delivery (Dormann & Zapf, 2004;Shao & Skarlicki, 2014). The role of the self is especially salient in service work because it is often regarded as lowstatus, stigmatized work (Shantz & Booth, 2014). Older service workers-like their younger counterparts-may be exposed to customer mistreatment, which could impact their service delivery.…”

Deadly combinations: how leadership contexts undermine the activation and enactment of followers’ high core self-evaluations in performance

“…For example, Judge and Bono's (2001) meta-analysis showed that, across 274 CSE, CONTEXT AND PERFORMANCE correlations between components of CSE and performance, there were positive, negative and non-significant relationships. Kacmar, Collins, Harris and Judge (2009) found evidence that the CSE-performance relationship may be negative in certain contexts, and a similar conclusion was drawn by Shantz and Booth (2014). A common theme in these studies is the role of leaders in creating environments that shape the enactment of dispositions in performance.…”