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Subtle exclusionary practices targeted at employees are observed within organizations, including ostracism (Liu and Xia 2016; Zhao et al. 2019). Studied through other aversive behaviors such as bullying, workplace incivility, or organizational silence, ostracism was only conceptualized in management from 2008 with the founding work of Ferris et al. (2008). Paradoxically, some organizationally ostracized individuals may be venerated in the societal sphere (Watts and Buckley 2017). Faced with this paradox, this article aims to characterize the process of ostracism leading to veneration by using Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Ugly Duckling (1842). It then tests it by looking at a particular case of ostracism: that exercised against whistleblowers.