Scarlet Letters: Rehabilitation Through Transgression Transparency and Personal Narrative Control

When employees commit transgressions, organizations often use tools of organizational control to prevent them from transgressing again. We investigate whether organizations can use transgression transparency to rehabilitate transgressors. Although making transgressions transparent—which may result in stigmatization or public shaming—is generally assumed to be purely punitive, we show when and how it can foster rehabilitation. We draw on a longitudinal, qualitative dataset of 23 similarly situated transgressors at a military academy that added transparency to traditional punishment by requiring transgressors to wear a pin that signaled their transgression. Data from transgressors and from other organizational members revealed that instead of prompting persistent stigmatization, social awareness of the transgression prompted others’ inquiry, gradually engaging transgressors in a coactive process to develop a mutually acceptable narrative of their transgression through a mechanism we call personal narrative control. For that personal narrative to endure, transgressors needed to exercise self-control and avoid further transgressions, as they did in our study even after the pin was removed, signaling rehabilitation. We induce four contextual conditions for transgression transparency to trigger personal narrative control and theorize how they might generalize to other organizations seeking to rehabilitate transgressors.