The dark side of office designs: Towards de-humanization
(2019) New Technology, Work & Employment — Vol. 34, p. 262-284 (2019)
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- Authors
Parmentier, Michaël 
- Abstract
- Recent research on flexible office designs have shown that open-plan and/or flex offices may not have the expected effects in terms of employees’ productivity, well-being, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and retention. In this article, we propose to consider that the feeling of de-humanization may explain such dark side of office designs. Adopting a mixed methods approach, we administrated a quantitative survey to 534 employees working in a variety of office designs, and conducted 12 semi-structured interviews among the respondents to the survey in order to investigate how they experienced their office designs, notably in terms of de-humanization. Results showed that the three specific office designs under study (i.e., cell, open-plan, and flex offices) are associated with different levels of de-humanization and that this feeling of de-humanization 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 office designs: a triple feeling of dispossession (of space, voice and professional mastery), a feeling of abandon and an injunction to adopt a modern behaviour.
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Citations
Taskin, L., Parmentier, M., & Stinglhamber, F. (2019). The dark side of office designs: Towards de-humanization. New Technology, Work & Employment, 34, 262-284. https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12150 (Original work published 2019)