{"id":8599,"date":"2026-08-13T18:44:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T18:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aom.org\/today\/?p=8599"},"modified":"2026-08-13T18:44:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T18:44:27","slug":"overcoming-the-stigma-against-juggling-gigs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aom.org\/today\/overcoming-the-stigma-against-juggling-gigs\/","title":{"rendered":"Overcoming the Stigma Against Juggling Gigs"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daniel Butcher<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s according to Academy of Management Scholar Brianna Barker Caza<\/a> of the Bryan School of Business and Economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who coauthored an Academy of Management Discoveries<\/em> article<\/a> on the topic with fellow AOM Scholars Kelley Main of the University of Manitoba and Anastasia Stuart-Edwards of the University of Lethbridge, Calgary.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know the multiple jobholders\u2019 experience of multiple jobholding, but do we know how other people are perceiving them?\u201d Caza said. \u201cBecause 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo 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,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was an experiment, so half of them had side gigs, half of them did not, but the rest of their profile was the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Caza, Main, and Stuart-Edwards were looking at how people would evaluate them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we found was really interesting in that generally these whit- collar professionals were discounted if they also reported a side gig,\u201d Caza said. \u201cThis 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou were less likely to want to work with them or hire them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Caza and colleagues explored a number of different moderating factors for removing that stigma or discounting effect.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes 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,\u201d Caza said. \u201cBeing able to help others understand is key, because when we\u2019re trying to understand why somebody has a counter-normative career pattern that\u2019s different from our expectation or doesn\u2019t quite meet what we think of as a career prototype, we need a little bit of help understanding it.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo there might be initial discounting effects that people who work multiple jobs experience, but we can come to understand, \u2018No, this person is really passionate about this\u2014they just have other interests as well,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven saying something like, \u2018I do this because, while I love being a dentist, I also have a business side of me, so I like running a caf\u00e9,\u2019 or, \u2018I 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,\u2019 and what we found was that really any kind of explanation or story made people mitigate that discounting effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A sample of Caza\u2019s AOM research findings:<\/strong><\/p>\n