The threat of occupational stigma to employees’ self-evaluation is often the logical starting point for researchers to argue the influence mechanisms of occupational stigma. However, whether this proactive condition is valid or not remains to be verified. Drawing on the social identity theory and stress coping theory, this study contends that occupational stigma has a negative impact on the core self-evaluation of employees, and is indirectly related to employee task performance through core self-evaluation. This study further proposes that active occupational stigma coping strategies reduce the negative impact of occupational stigma on core self-evaluation, while avoidant occupational stigma coping strategies strengthen the negative relationship.

We collected paired data from 218 coal miners and their direct supervisors through three waves. In the first phase, we collected data about occupational stigma perception and stigma coping strategies from 246 coal miners; after one month, in the second phase, we asked the employees who had taken part in our first-phase survey to fill CSE and gained 239 valid questionnaires; another month past, we asked the direct supervisors of the employees who had completed the previous two-phase questionnaires to comment on the task performance of their subordinates. At last, we matched the three-time data and got 218 valid questionnaires. The results support all our hypotheses.

The main theoretical contributions lie in two aspects: Firstly, this study explores and demonstrates the hypothesis that occupational stigma perception has a negative influence on CSE. This finding responds to Hughes’s conclusion that occupations’ dirtiness characteristics might destroy employees’ self-cognition, which lays a solid foundation for further research on occupational stigma. Secondly, this study analyzes and demonstrates whether and how different occupational stigma coping strategies reduce the negative effect of occupational stigma on employees effectively and expands the mechanism of occupational stigma from the stress coping perspective. The finding about active occupational stigma coping strategies explains and validates the opinion put forward by Ashforth and co-authors based on practical experience: occupational stigma does not necessarily negatively affect employees’ self-esteem because employees might adopt active coping strategies; analysis and comparison of the effect between the two occupational stigma coping strategies, active and avoidant, demonstrate the inference that Bosmans and co-authors put forward but failed to prove: the influence effects of different stigma coping strategies may not be consistent.

The practical significance is as follows: Coping strategies include cognitive, emotional and behavioral stress responses. Employees sometimes hold the strategy of active coping, and sometimes avoidant coping, but they do not necessarily know which one is helpful for them to alleviate their destroyed self-view and thus improve their job performance. Enterprises can design training courses and contents accordingly to improve employees’ ability to actively deal with occupational stigma.