A Research On The Mechanism Of How Occupational Stigma Influences Mental Health

Nowadays,mental health such as workplace anxiety,work burnout and job stress become increasingly common problems in the workforce.Employee health is not only about the company’s cost profit issue,but more about the continuous and steady health development of an enterprise.Employee health concerns have received significant attention from enterprises.However,how the enterprise should advance and implement the management of employee health remains a difficult problem,especially for dirty work enterprises which are more prone to trigger employee health problems.Dirty work has lower occupational prestige,lower diversity of skills,and higher occupational stigma,and practitioners are also often left with disregard,discrimination,and rejection,factors which can worsen practitioner’s health problem.Although there have been some studies examining the effects of occupational stigma brought about by dirty work on employee mental health,the lack of exploration of the specific mechanisms of action in between is detrimental to our ability to gain insight into the particularities of dirty work practitioners’ health problems,and hinders companies or organizations from taking targeted measures to manage dirty work practitioners’ health problems.To bridge the gap of existing research between occupational stigma and mental health faced by dirty work practitioners,based on social information processing theory,this study examines the impact of social avoidance induced by occupational stigma on the mental health of practitioners,and the moderating role of caring ethical climate created by the organization.In this study,questionnaire was distributed in two periods to front-line employees of the workshop in a logistics enterprise in China,and 200 valid matched questionnaires were finally retrieved.An empirical analysis of sample data found that occupational stigma positively affects practitioner social avoidance and negatively affects their mental health;Social avoidance plays a mediating role between occupational stigma and practitioners’ mental health;The positive relationship between occupational stigma and social avoidance is moderated by the caring ethical climate,which is shown as follows: the stronger the caring ethical climate,the stronger the positive effect of occupational stigma on social avoidance.Furthermore,the interaction of occupational stigma and caring ethical climate negatively influences mental health through social avoidance.This paper has important theoretical contributions to the field of occupational stigma and health.First,this study broadens the level of research on occupational stigma,existing studies comparing the roles and responsibilities of firms in the management of occupational stigma from the organizational level are lacking.This study demonstrates that organizations can moderate the negative effect of occupational stigma by creating a caring ethical climate.Second,research perspectives on occupational stigma and mental health were enriched.Current research mechanisms of occupational stigma are limited to the theoretical perspective of social identity and its correlates,and scholars mainly explore the mechanisms underlying employee health from the perspectives of perception of(un)fairness,resource gains and losses,and psychological demands.Based on social information processing theory,this paper examines the negative impact of occupational stigma on practitioners’ mental health;Meanwhile,social information processing theory emphasizes the importance of information in the work context,and this paper introduces occupational stigma derived from outside the organization,which compensates for the inadequacy of social information processing theory in the interpretation of outside the organization context.Third,studies on antecedents and influencing mechanisms of mental health were enriched.Although the problem of employee health has been longstanding,most of the existing research stays at the stage of simply demonstrating the positive and negative effects of various variables on employee health,lacking in-depth exploration of the specific explanatory mechanisms among them.This paper verifies the negative impact of occupational stigma on the mental health of practitioners,and the mediating role that social avoidance plays in it,demonstrating that occupational stigma is able to elicit practitioner health problems by influencing the way practitioners behave.Fourth,caring ethical climate has been shown to benefit employees’ positive behaviors and cognitions in previous studies,with a positive effect on organizational operations,but in this study,it will strengthen the negative effect of occupational stigma.The present study confirms the distinctiveness and complexity of management among dirty workers,and the same organizational management practices may have quite different effects from previous studies due to the practitioner’s perception of occupational stigma.