Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Stigmatization and the Emergence of Organizational Paranoia

• In Event: B.E.S.T.: The Dark Side of Organizations--Paranoia/Paradox, Risk/Disaster, Invisibility, Unemployment, Ostracizing and Beyond...

Abstract

We report from an inductive field study on the effects of stigmatization on the construction of organizational identity. Our findings show how paranoid convictions and paranoid defense mechanisms emerge among employees and strongly influence the way they relate to their workplace. While other studies of stigmatization have demonstrated how individuals or groups are able to construct positive ways of coping with stigma, by contrast our data (from media, management and employees) suggests that stigmatization is reinforced in the interplay between media and management in vicious circles of paranoia that become defining for employees and organizational identity. Our findings reveal previously unreported aspects of stigmatization that demonstrate how paranoia itself becomes a coping mechanism and how organizational paranoia is produced and reproduced in self-fulfilling processes that seem to be irrecoverable. Our findings show the social dynamics that emerge when stigmatization is transformed into an organizational existential crisis.

Authors

• Sanne Frandsen, Copenhagen Business School

• Mette Morsing, Copenhagen Business School