Published on: August 13, 2026 at 6:44 pm
While holding multiple jobs at once still can carry a stigma despite being fairly common, a simple explanation from professionals with more than one gig goes a long way toward reversing negative reactions.
That’s according to Academy of Management Scholar Brianna Barker Caza of the Bryan School of Business and Economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who coauthored an Academy of Management Discoveries article on the topic with fellow AOM Scholars Kelley Main of the University of Manitoba and Anastasia Stuart-Edwards of the University of Lethbridge, Calgary.
“We know the multiple jobholders’ experience of multiple jobholding, but do we know how other people are perceiving them?” Caza said. “Because in my own previous qualitative research, we learned that a lot of people felt like they were being discounted and that other people thought that they had career ADHD, or that they were scattered, or that what they were doing was just kind of an immature way of going about a professional career.
“So we designed a couple of different studies where we took white-collar professionals who had a main profession in things like dentistry or veterinarian science or university professors, and then we gave half of them a side gig,” she said. “It was an experiment, so half of them had side gigs, half of them did not, but the rest of their profile was the same.”
Caza, Main, and Stuart-Edwards were looking at how people would evaluate them.
“What we found was really interesting in that generally these whit- collar professionals were discounted if they also reported a side gig,” Caza said. “This suggests that if you were looking for a new dentist, and then you also learned that the dentist was an entrepreneur or a digital-marketing professional on the side, you just may automatically assume that they were less competent and less dedicated to their dentistry work.
“You were less likely to want to work with them or hire them,” she said.
Caza and colleagues explored a number of different moderating factors for removing that stigma or discounting effect.
“Sometimes just giving people a bit more detail, a story to understand your choice of having multiple jobs, helps them to not discount your competency and dedication,” Caza said. “Being able to help others understand is key, because when we’re trying to understand why somebody has a counter-normative career pattern that’s different from our expectation or doesn’t quite meet what we think of as a career prototype, we need a little bit of help understanding it.
“So there might be initial discounting effects that people who work multiple jobs experience, but we can come to understand, ‘No, this person is really passionate about this—they just have other interests as well,’” she said.
“Even saying something like, ‘I do this because, while I love being a dentist, I also have a business side of me, so I like running a café,’ or, ‘I believe that you can never be too safe in this market, because it is uncertain, so I like hedging my bets by having a second source of income,’ and what we found was that really any kind of explanation or story made people mitigate that discounting effect.”
A sample of Caza’s AOM research findings:
- The Bright Side of Not Getting That Promotion
- Four Things Bystanders Should Know about Aggression at Work
- Positive Feedback Can Help People See Past Stereotypes
- Workplaces Profoundly Shape Employees’ Identities
- How to Counter Bias against Having Multiple Jobs
