The risks of online ambassadorship: can unethical organizational behavior spill-over on employee’s reputation?

Practices such as encouraging employees to promote the company’s actions on private social media accounts are today part of corporate reputation strategies and contribute to the normalisation of employees as communication agent for corporate interests. While those practices are sometimes encouraged within organisations, employees also engage spontaneously in ambassadorship behaviours on Facebook, sharing corporate posts, thereby signalling their support and loyalties to a vast and diverse audience. Employees are often oblivious of the possible repercussions and risks of presenting themselves as ambassadors of their company’s actions on Facebook. In controversial industries however, employees sometimes intentionally do not disclose the identity of their employer and their job satisfaction to protect their personal reputation. The present research argues that stigma transfer from tainted corporate reputation to employees’ reputation is a resulting risk of engaging in ambassadorship behaviours on Facebook. The objective of this project is to understand the mechanisms and the key characteristics of stigma transfer from organisations to employees through the moral judgements of outsiders. The context of this type of stigma transfer is analysed in depth, from the mediated and framed information acquisition to the human tendency to be attracted by negative information and the role of negative emotions in the formation of moral judgements of others. The motivations for employees to engage in ambassadorship behaviours on Facebook are also investigated. A hundred and eighty representant of the general working population participated in an online experiment. The experimental design was aimed at measuring participants’ experience of negative emotions and their judgments of a fictitious employee’s morality and ability after reading negatively framed information about his fictitious company. The employee was sharing a post from his company active in the oil and gas industry, along with his pride to be working for the company. The conducted experiment followed a 3 (framing: positive vs negative vs neutral) by 2 (engagement: low vs high) factorial design. The findings confirmed that negative media frames negatively impact the judgements of the employee’s morality made by outsiders. Moreover, the employee’s active display of engagement with his company on Facebook also influences outsiders’ judgements of his morality, albeit positively, which emphasizes the importance of adherence to social media norms. The significant mediator role of negative emotions in the relationship of negative media framing and the formation of judgements of morality is also highlighted by the results. This study contributes to organizational and stigma by association literature by integrating framing theories, negativity bias, the role of emotions in moral judgements, and employee engagement in its framework. Its findings might inform both employees’ behaviours on Facebook and Human Resources departments in establishing best practices around social media use outside work.