The Career Consequences of Workplace Protest Participation: Theory and Evidence from the NFL “Take a Knee” Movement

Abstract

Despite recognizing potential ramifications for employees who protest in the workplace, researchers rarely explore the career consequences that stem from such instances of workplace protest participation. We integrated research on employee activism, workplace deviance, and careers to theorize that workplace protest represents a perceived deviation from workplace norms that can influence an individual’s organizational and labor market mobility outcomes. We investigated this premise with the 2016 National Football League “take a knee” protests as a strategic research setting. The results indicate that protesting is associated with an increase in organizational exit although this effect is moderated by the degree to which the organization is sensitive to the underlying social movement (with an organization’s movement sensitivity operationalized with a four-part index composed of the team’s managers, personnel decision makers, owners, and customers). Protesting also is associated with labor market sorting across organizations as players who protest are more likely to make subsequent transitions to more movement-sensitive teams compared with players who do not protest. Overall, our findings offer contributions for research on employee activism, workplace deviance, and careers.

When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics

“…The first order of business would seem to call for more research on moral flexibility, its determinants and effects. The form of moral flexibility we study can also help explain findings in policy-relevant areas outside electoral politics, such as a recent finding that workplace norm violations are interpreted differently based on whether key decision-makers agree with the norm-violating act (e.g., Rheinhardt, Poskanzer and Briscoe 2023). In conducting the literature review for this paper, the authors were startled that we could find no research on Americans' commitment to democratic norms published before the early 1980s (Chong et al, 1983); and that prior to the 2020 National Election Study, the National Election Studies had never asked questions about respondents' commitment to democratic norms, including that of fact-grounding.…”