OCCUPATIONAL MORAL STIGMA IN THE GAMBLING INDUSTRY: SCALE DEVELOPMENT

Despite the growth in research studies which examine aspects of organizational stigma, little is understood about the 91-year-old U.S. industry of legalized casino gambling. This study explores the age-old public stigma of immorality associated with gambling activities from an interlevel perspective to understand whether the organization’s moral stigma transfers down to casino table game dealers, and to what degree does this population incur devaluation from the public as they carry out the duties of their occupational role?

To examine these questions, a scale for the latent construct of occupational moral stigmatization was developed through a deductive approach and then tested for nomological validity. A survey research method was employed to capture a diverse range of sentiments from casino dealers and the baseline population of non-casino workers from across the United States. This study leveraged social media sites to access both populations, resulting in the total engagement of 406 casino dealers across four studies, and 248 non-casino workers across two studies.

The research results from this study confirm that the activity of gambling continues to have a negative attribution, as a result table game dealers experience occupational moral stigmatization, which leads to a state of burnout out and a coping strategy of occupational production deviance. Thus, this study confirms that the moral stigma held at the organizational level transfers to casino dealers. Further, the findings support the growing body of scientific evidence that a moral stigma cannot be legislated away through the legalization process in order to erase the history that initially ascribed a negative label to the activity of gambling, as a means to forewarn the public to its harms.