Congruence work in stigmatized occupations: A managerial lens on employee fit with dirty work

• Author: Glen E. Kreiner,Mark A. Clark,Mel Fugate,Blake E. Ashforth
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2201
• Published date: 01 October 2017
• Date: 01 October 2017

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Congruence work in stigmatized occupations: A managerial lens

on employee fit with dirty work

Blake E. Ashforth

1

|Glen E. Kreiner

2

|Mark A. Clark

3

|Mel Fugate

4

1

Horace Steele Arizona Heritage Chair,

Department of Management, W.P. Carey

School of Business, Arizona State University,

Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.

2

John and Becky Surma Dean's Research

Fellow, Smeal College of Business, The

Pennsylvania State University, University Park,

Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

3

Department of Management, Kogod School

of Business, American University, Washington,

District of Columbia, U.S.A.

4

School of Management, University of South

Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Correspondence

Blake E. Ashforth, Horace Steele Arizona

Heritage Chair, Department of Management,

W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State

University, Tempe, Arizona 85283, U.S.A.

Email: blake.ashforth@asu.edu

Summary

Although research has established that it is often difficult for individuals engaged in dirty work to

adjust to stigma and the attributes giving rise to stigma, little theory or empirical work addresses

how managers may help workers adjust to dirty work. Interviews with managers across 18 dirty

work occupations—physically tainted (e.g., animal control), socially tainted (e.g., corrections),

and morally tainted (e.g., exotic entertainment)—indicate that managers engage in “congruence

work”: behaviors, sensemaking, and sensegiving that they perceive as helping individuals adjust

and develop a stronger sense of person–environment fit. Specifically, congruence work focuses

on 3 phases of managerial practices that correspond to individuals' growing experience in the

occupation. First, recruitment/selection involves overcoming individuals' aversion to dirty work

by selecting individuals with an affinity for the work and providing a realistic stigma preview.

Second, socialization involves helping newcomers adjust to distasteful tasks and to stigma by

using targeted divestiture, developing perspective taking, helping newcomers manage external

relationships, and utilizing desensitization or immersion. Third, ongoing management roles involve

cementing individuals' fit by fostering social validation, protecting workers from dirty work

hazards, and negotiating the frontstage/backstage boundary. The practices identified as

congruence work highlight the important role that managers can play in facilitating adjustment

for both “dirty workers”and presumably their less stigmatized counterparts.

KEYWORDS

dirty work, person‐environment fit, socialization, stigma

1|INTRODUCTION

“Dirty work”occupations—those which are regarded as physically,

socially, and/or morally tainted (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999; Hughes,

1951, 1958)—pose particular challenges to workers and their man-

agers. These challenges stem from the off‐putting nature of the tasks

as well as the taint associated with those tasks. For instance, how

might a manager introduce a novice veterinary clinic worker to the

grisly reality of euthanizing healthy animals? How might a manager

enhance the problematic self‐esteem of a veteran exotic dancer?

How might a manager disabuse a new debt collector of his negative

stereotypes of clients? In short, “Managers of those in stigmatized

occupations may have a particularly important role to play in normaliz-

ing the taint”(Shantz & Booth, 2014, p. 1458). And yet, research has

been surprisingly quiet about how managers use their perspectives,

tools, and organizational systems to help workers address the unique

challenges of dirty work.

Both conceptual research and empirical research have focused

almost exclusively on the nature of dirty work as perceived and

experienced by the workers. Further, research has tended to focus on

one occupation at a time, such as nurses (Mills & Schejbal, 2007),

animal shelter employees (Lopina, Rogelberg, & Howell, 2012),

domestic workers (Bosmans et al., 2016), zookeepers (Bunderson &

Thompson, 2009), police officers (Dick, 2005), and casino employees

(Lai, Chan, & Lam, 2013). Although this research has generated rich

descriptions and insights about a variety of occupations, it has only

begun to coalesce into overarching theory about the management of

dirty work more generally (Bickmeier, Lopina, & Rogelberg, 2015;

Simpson, Slutskaya, Lewis, & Höpfl, 2012). This led us to ask, what

are the roles of a manager who must lead those engaged in dirty work?

We found, through our qualitative study, that concerns of worker

congruence permeated the managerial process in dirty work

occupations. Thus, the purpose of this study became to reveal, through

a managerial lens, the process of managing dirty work to enhance

Received: 16 March 2016 Revised: 16 April 2017 Accepted: 23 April 2017

DOI: 10.1002/job.2201

1260 Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2017;38:1260–1279.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

individuals' “congruence with their work environment”—their sense

of person–environment (P‐E) fit (Vogel & Feldman, 2009, p. 68;

see Edwards, 2008, and Kristof‐Brown & Guay, 2011, for reviews

of P‐E fit research). With our data, we developed the idea of

“congruence work”to demonstrate the specific tactics undertaken by

managers in the expectation that they would help their employees

perceive a greater fit with their stigmatized occupations. We

unpack congruence work in stigmatized occupations during three

key adjustment phases: recruitment/selection, socialization, and

ongoing management (cf. Kristof‐Brown & Guay, 2011; Werbel &

DeMarie, 2005).

Addressing these issues is important for several reasons. First,

despite the gains in our understanding of the nature of dirty work jobs,

the dearth of systematic study of the management of such jobs has

created a shortfall for both theory and practice. Knowing how workers

experience dirty work does not address what managers do to facilitate

adjustment to dirty work. Hence, to advance both research and prac-

tice, we need to understand management processes that may help

workers adjust in the broad array of dirty work jobs. Second, because

virtually all jobs have some element of stigma (Hughes, 1951; Kreiner,

Ashforth, & Sluss, 2006), knowing how to manage stigma in its varying

forms can have widespread applicability. Third, other mainstream man-

agement literatures (e.g., P‐E fit, recruitment, socialization) can be

enriched by considering how a dirty work context might provide

important boundary conditions for those literatures. Specifically, we

consider how managerial tactics regarding recruitment/selection,

socialization, and ongoing management roles may facilitate P‐E fit, not-

ing which tactics appear unique to the dirty work context and which

can be adapted from the extant literatures involving nondirty work.

1.1 |Dirty work

The genesis of dirty work research began with the notion of “stigma,”a

longstanding social construct that Goffman (1963) refers to as a

“spoiled identity.”Whereas early philosophers argued that stigma

was a fixed property of individuals (an essentialist perspective), social

psychologists and anthropologists treat stigma as a social construction.

Stigmas can derive from objects, processes, places, or people that have

certain characteristics or behaviors that are interpreted as a form of

threat to individuals or society (Crocker & Major, 1989). Stigmatized

individuals are regarded by significant segments of society as flawed,

deviant, and/or inferior in some way. The negative associations of a

stigma mean that the individual is “reduced in our minds from a whole

and usual person to a tainted, discounted one”(Goffman, 1963, p. 3). In

the case of dirty work, stigma is transferred from the work to the indi-

viduals who perform it, such that they are often treated as “dirty

workers.”The burden of this stigma and the tasks that engender it

can foster a sense among potential recruits and the workers alike that

they lack fit with the work. Yet, as noted, the important role that man-

agers may play in counteracting these perceptions has not been sys-

tematically investigated.

1.1.1 |Physical, social, and moral stigma

Occupational dirt is socially constructed and derives from the pre-

dominant belief in society that clean equates to good and dirty

equates to bad (Douglas, 1966). Physical stigma is often the easiest

type of dirty work to envision, and the earliest research focused

on those who deal with trash, blood, or excrement, or with nox-

ious or dangerous working conditions (such as miners, roofers,

and firefighters; e.g., Douglas, 1966). Social stigma derives either

from routine association with stigmatized others (e.g., correctional

officers working with prisoners) or from subservient relationships

(e.g., butlers, taxi drivers). Moral stigma derives from the morally

questionable tasks inherent in some occupations (e.g., gambling

for casino workers, paid sexual behavior for prostitutes). Of course,

physical, social, and moral stigma are not mutually exclusive; a job

can be stigmatized on more than one dimension (Ashforth &

Kreiner, 2014b).

For their original conceptual framework, Ashforth and Kreiner

(1999) drew on these three types of stigma as one dimension of

dirty work. The other dimension was occupational prestige, varying

from relatively high (e.g., defense lawyers, lobbyists) to relatively

low (e.g., butchers, bill collectors). Hence, dirty work is not exclu-

sively associated with low‐status work. Higher prestige occupations

tend to have higher salaries and greater task complexity and draw

from a more educated labor pool. Although they enjoy some ben-

efits of the higher prestige, the stigma from their work remains

problematic (Cahill, 1999).

Although stigma is problematic for occupational members, mem-

bers are not necessarily destined for low occupational identification.

Taking an occupational‐level approach, Ashforth and Kreiner (1999,

2013) used a social identity lens to discuss how those engaged in dirty

work maintain a positive sense of self. First, strong occupational cul-

tures often emerge and are used as buffers against outside threats.

Second, these strong cultures often foster ideologies that enhance

the meaning of the work. Third, by emphasizing the “friendly”perspec-

tives of supporters such as family members and coworkers sympa-

thetic to their work, and by de‐emphasizing the critical perspectives

of those who condemn their work, those in dirty work jobs can reduce

the negative impact of the stigma. This work plants the seeds for a

theme we build upon—that perceptions of self‐in‐job are malleable

and create opportunities for managers to influence the experience of

stigmatized workers.

Empirical work has supported and extended these arguments (e.g.,

Ashforth, Kreiner, Clark, & Fugate, 2007; Bosmans et al., 2016; Cassell

& Bishop, 2014; Dick, 2005; Filteau, 2015; Johnston & Hodge, 2014;

Meldgaard Hansen, 2016; Selmi, 2012). For example, Bosmans et al.

(2016) document the use of ideologies, supporting supporters, and

condemning condemners in a study of domestic workers; Dick (2005)

describes how police officers absolve themselves of the moral ambigu-

ity surrounding the use of coercive force against citizens; and Selmi

(2012) found that phone sex workers resisted negative labeling and

cast their work in socially acceptable terms through “identity cleans-

ing.”Note, however, that this research has seldom examined the role

of the dirty work manager, a potentially important player in the adjust-

ment process.

Despite the research on how those in dirty work jobs are able to

construct positive identities, other research clearly demonstrates the

toll on these workers. For example, Kreiner, Ashforth, et al. (2006) note

how dirty work jobs are often rife with ambivalence—high

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