Seeing the good in the bad: A self-affirmation model of organizational dehumanization.

Organizational dehumanization has traditionally been conceptualized as a negative phenomenon that leads to undesirable consequences. In this research, we depart from this perspective and test the possibility that organizational dehumanization may also have an unexpected silver lining effect that extends beyond the workplace to benefit other individuals in employees’ social sphere. Drawing upon self-affirmation theory, we propose that organizational dehumanization threatens employees’ self-worth. To restore their self-worth, employees will reflect on their core values and social relationships, motivating them to engage in prosocial behaviors toward society (i.e., increased volunteering) and their family (i.e., increased family task performance), respectively. We anticipate that these effects will be more pronounced for employees whose self-worth is contingent on their ability to effectively help others. We test our hypotheses in two phases, encompassing six studies that employ complementary methodologies. In the first phase, we adopt a manipulation-of-mediator design that involves five interrelated experiments. In Study 1, we manipulate organizational dehumanization and measure self-worth threat; in Studies 2 and 3, we manipulate self-worth threat and measure self-affirmation of core values and social relationships, respectively; in Study 4, we manipulate self-affirmation of core values and measure volunteering; in Study 5, we manipulate self-affirmation of social relationships and measure family task performance. In the second phase, we conduct a field study (Study 6) in which we collect four-wave, dyadic (i.e., employee–partner/spouse) data aimed at testing the full moderated serial mediation model. All studies support our hypothesized relationships. Implications of our findings for theory and practice are discussed.