It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. Glen Kreiner is trying to figure out who - and why.
Kreiner, an assistant professor of organizational behavior in the University of Cincinnati's College of Business Administration, studies "dirty work," the kind of work that has a stigma attached to it. He and his research partners are currently examining the role of managers in dirty work occupations.
An initial presentation was made last fall at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, with a journal article currently in progress.
Kreiner looks at careers such as prison guard, personal injury lawyer, animal control officer, exotic entertainer and used car sales. "I had an interest in looking at people in the workplace who tend to get overlooked, the people society tends to shun," Kreiner says. "There's a very diverse group of occupations needed to get us through the day, and some of these people are not represented in the literature."
An early paper authored by Kreiner and research partner Blake Ashforth of Arizona State University reached an interesting conclusion. "One of the themes we found is these people highly identify with what they do. They are quite proud of their work, which seemed quite paradoxical," Kreiner says.
The current study looked at managers from 18 different stigmatized career areas, to see how the stigma impacted their management styles.
The research revealed several interesting discoveries.
While "dirty work" employees may highly identify with their jobs, that isn't always the case with their managers. In a phenomenon the researchers coined as "stigma distance," some managers try to rationalize a difference between their work and that of their employees. "A strip club manager we interviewed felt he could separate himself from all the stuff going on at his club, because he wasn't exposing his body," Kreiner says.
For some managers, the opposite is true. A manager at a used car lot felt enormous shame by association, after dealing with an elderly couple whom a different salesman several years before had talked into a car with lots of options they clearly couldn't afford. The manager told Kreiner, "And here I am, this freaking slothful pig, sitting there selling cars. I felt guilty being me."
Other coping tactics also became clear. In what sociologists refer to as "passing," some managers attempted to disguise their stigma. Animal control officers tell their children that "I take care of animals," while they tell other adults that "I work for the county." When servicing office buildings, some exterminators choose to wear a shirt and tie rather than their company's uniform.
Another approach employed by the managers were social comparisons that drew favorable comparisons for themselves compared to others doing similar work. One manager of a commercial roofing company drew a distinction between the craftsmanship involved on his jobs and the skills needed for residential roofing, which he said you could "train monkeys to do."
Kreiner says its worth remembering that the managers they studied have much more in common with managers in other fields than they had different because of any stigma attached. The biggest challenge, which many managers addressed early on in training, was teaching employees how to cope with the stigma of the job.
Kreiner and his associates are very careful in identifying jobs that truly qualify as "dirty work." To qualify, the taint of the job has to be centrally defining to it. Most aspects of the job have to be related to the stigma, and the stigma itself has to run fairly deep.
"All jobs have 'dirty work' components to them," Kreiner says. "As a professor, I can say that I don't like grading, but grading is still much less odious than thousands of other tasks I could have in a job."
In addition to Kreiner and Ashforth, the managerial study was conducted by Mark Clark of American University and Mel Fugate of Tulane University.