The dark side of office designs: towards de‐humanization

• Author: Florence Stinglhamber,Laurent Taskin,Michaël Parmentier
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12150
• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Date: 01 November 2019

262 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

New Technology, Work and Employment 34:3

ISSN 1468-005X

The dark side of ofce designs: towards

de‐humanization

Laurent Taskin , Michaël Parmentier and Florence

Stinglhamber

Recent research on exible ofce designs have shown that

open‐plan and/or ex ofces may not have the expected effects

in terms of employees’ productivity, well‐being, job satisfac-

tion, organizational commitment, and retention. In this arti-

cle, we propose to consider that the feeling of de‐humanization

may explain such dark side of ofce designs. Adopting a mixed

methods approach, we administrated a quantitative survey to

534 employees working in a variety of ofce designs, and con-

ducted 12 semi‐structured interviews among the respondents to

the survey in order to investigate how they experienced their

ofce designs, notably in terms of de‐humanization. Results

showed that the three specic ofce designs under study (i.e.

cell, open‐plan, and ex ofces) are associated with different

levels of de‐humanization and that this feeling of de‐human-

ization mediates their impact on employees’ job satisfaction,

affective organizational commitment, extra‐role performance,

psychological strains, and turnover intentions. Interviews’

analysis reveals three main mechanisms in the development of

the feeling of de‐humanization in such ofce designs: a triple

feeling of dispossession (of space, voice and professional mas-

tery), a feeling of abandon and an injunction to adopt a modern

behaviour.

Keywords: exwork, ofce design, de‐humanization, mixed

method.

Laurent Taskin (laurent.taskin@uclouvain.be), Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, is a Profes-

sor of Human Resource Management and Organisation Studies at the Louvain School of Management,

Louvain Research Institute in Management and Organisations. His main research interests include new

ways of managing and organizing work, organizational control and humanistic management. He has

published in journals like Organization Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, The International Journal

of Human Resource Management, and (co‐)authored a dozen of books in the eld, including Critical

Management Studies: Global voices, local accents (Routledge, 2016, with C. Grey, I. Huault and V. Perret).

Michaël Parmentier (michael.parmentier@uclouvain.be) is a PhD candidate of Work and Vocational

Psychology in Psychology Department at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain‐la‐Neuve,

Belgium). His main research interest spans the role of emotion in educational and career transitions.

Specically, his PhD investigates emotional anticipation processes and their impact on vocational

behavior.

Florence Stinglhamber (orence.stinglhamber@uclouvain.be) is an Associate Professor of Organiza-

tional Psychology and Human Resource Management in the Psychology Department at the Universi-

té catholique de Louvain (Louvain‐la‐Neuve, Belgium). Her research interests include organizational

dehumanization, perceived organizational support, and workplace justice. She is the (co‐)author of

a number of peer‐reviewed articles published in international journals such as Journal of Applied

Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Journal of Vocational Behavior.

The dark side of ofce designs 263

© 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Introduction

Research on workplace exibility crosses a wide array of arenas, ranging from work

schedule exibility to telecommuting but also including ofce designs (Putnam etal.,

2014; Richardson and McKenna, 2014). Precisely, we focus here on spatial exibility

and refer to ofce designs encompassing ofce layouts such as cell ofces, open‐plan

ofces and ex ofces (Bodin Danielsson etal., 2014). While often associated with pos-

itive outcomes (Sanchez etal., 2007; Peters et al., 2014; Felstead and Henseke, 2017),

recent studies on exible ofce designs have shown that open‐plan and/or ex ofces

may not have the expected effects in terms of employees’ productivity, well‐being, job

satisfaction, organizational commitment, and retention.

The aim of the present research is to better understand why ofce designs may have

negative effects. Specically, relying on the recent literature on organizational de‐

humanization (Bell and Khoury, 2016) as well as on studies on exibility pointing to

humanization (Desombre etal., 2006), we argue that employees’ feeling of being de‐

humanized by their organization may explain the recently observed negative effects of

ofce designs. Adopting a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative and

qualitative data collection (Stich et al., 2017), this basic assumption was examined

through a two‐step process. First, we suggest that by thwarting basic socio‐emotional

human needs in varying degrees the three ofce designs under study in this research

(i.e. cell, open‐plan, and ex ofces) should produce different levels of organizational

de‐humanization among employees experiencing them. Further, because organiza-

tional de‐humanization has been found to impact employees’ well‐being, attitudes and

behaviours at work, we expect that this effect will carry over to employees’ psycholog-

ical strains, job satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, extra‐role perfor-

mance, and turnover intentions. These hypotheses were empirically tested through a

eld study conducted via questionnaires. Second, semi‐structured interviews were

conducted in order to inductively observe how and why de‐humanization was experi-

enced by employees working in the different kinds of ofce designs under

investigation.

This research contributes to two literatures that have developed largely inde-

pendently of each other. On the one hand, we consider the workplace exibility litera-

ture in management, which regards ofce designs as part of exible working

arrangements explaining the broad organizational performance. We contribute to this

literature by proposing and empirically testing an underlying mechanism of the nega-

tive effects of ofce designs. On the other hand, we consider the emerging literature on

de‐humanization in the workplace. Our work will add to the burgeoning literature on

this recent construct that is organizational de‐humanization by exploring its nomolog-

ical network in the context of specic managerial practices.

The effects of ofce designs

Flexible workplace often evokes a common willingness to break with the rigid and

bureaucratic way of organizing work (Felstead etal., 2003; Kelliher and Richardson,

2012; Kingma, 2018). While it may be referred to as a homogeneous set of practices, we

focus here on spatial exibility and refer to cell ofces (i.e. an individual ofce), open‐

plan ofces (i.e. a collective ofce, with personalized workstations) and ex ofces (i.e.

a collective and shared workspace; Bodin Danielsson etal., 2014).

Organizations that engage in ofce redesigns are interested in saving money through

the reduction of space and associated real estate costs (Baldry and Barnes, 2012). But

other motivations also lie in the expected positive effects of such ofce designs on em-

ployees’ productivity, well‐being, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and

retention (Golden and Veiga, 2005; Gajendran and Harrison, 2007; Sanchez etal., 2007).

Moreover, open‐plan and ex ofces are also implemented with the aim to improve

the quality and the quantity of communication and collaboration (Zalesny and Farace,