The present study combines dehumanization research with the concept of organizational trust to examine how employees perceive various types of maltreatment embedded within the organizational practices that form the ethical climate of an organization. With the help of grounded theory methodology, we analyzed 188 employment exit interview transcripts from an ICT subcontracting company. By examining perceived trustworthiness and perceived humanness, we found that dehumanizing employees can deteriorate trust within organizations. The violations found in the empirical material were divided into animalistic (...) and mechanistic forms of dehumanization and linked to perceived integrity and benevolence, respectively. Based on the results, a model describing the link between dehumanization and trust is presented and discussed in relation to the ways in which perceptions of humanness become rooted in practices and affect the basic assumptions underlying ethical organizational behavior. (shrink)

The objective of the present study is to examine the ethical grounding and process-relational nature of meaningful work through the relationship of dignity and meaningfulness. Adopting a practice lens, we show how a shift from methodological individualism to a process-relational worldview allows meaningful work to be understood through organizational activities rather than individual characteristics. Building on practice-based theorization, we present a process-relational model of meaningful work that 1) examines meaningfulness as a flow of experience in the stream of work activity (...) events; 2) highlights how experiencing meaningfulness is embedded in social practices, distinguishing it as a social phenomenon that is defined by this embeddedness; 3) delineates situationality, historicity, and contextuality of meaningfulness; and 4) shows how meaningful work is grounded in the prioritization of dignity in the logic of practice. Accordingly, our model enables a more holistic understanding of how dignity functions as the ethical basis for the experience of meaningfulness in the context of work and organization. (shrink)

In this study, we theorize humanness in organizations as a property of practice. We apply practice theory to examine how humanness becomes enacted in a business organization as people prioritize organizational and individual ends in their work activities. Our empirical case study examines the everyday interactions of development team members in an R&D organization of a large Nordic cooperative. Challenging the dominant individualist and structuralist approaches in humanness and human dignity studies, we identify and locate four different aspects of humanness (...) in organizational practices. As a result, we show how the emergence of humanness is an ongoing process that transpires through two mechanisms: site shifting and reconciliation; that is, people shift between different sites of the social, consisting of different sets of practices with underlying disparate assumptions of humanness, which requires reconciliation. These findings provide a basis for an alternative theorizing of humanness in organizations. (shrink)