The preservation of the qualitative properties of physical phenomena in numerical models of these phenomena is an important requirement in scientific computations. In this paper, the numerical solutions of a one-dimensional linear parabolic problem are analysed. The problem can be considered as a altitudinal part of a split air pollution transport model or a heat conduction equation with a linear source term. The paper is focussed on the so-called sign-stability property, which reflects the fact that the number of the spatial sign changes of the solution does not grow in time. We give sufficient conditions that guarantee the sign-stability both for the finite difference and the finite element methods.