Emotional Labor: The Role of Organizational Dehumanization

In a permanent quest for profit, employees can be reduced to a mere function or instrument, dissociated from their quality as individuals for the organization's ends. Experiencing such a feeling as an employee has been called organizational dehumanization. Scholars have recently suggested that organizational dehumanization may play a key role in the development of emotional labor. However, how organizational dehumanization and two main emotional labor strategies (i.e., surface and deep acting) are causally related remains unclear in this literature. In the present research, we argue that employees who experience organizational dehumanization and whose self is thus threatened then engage in surface acting to "conserve" their self or in deep acting to "give up" their self in service of the role. Overall, the combined results of three studies offer strong evidence that organizational dehumanization leads employees to perform more surface acting, but not more deep acting. Unexpectedly, our findings also indicate that deep acting reduces the perception of being dehumanized by the organization. In showing this, the present research sheds light on the potential dark side of deep acting, by suggesting that this strategy can change employees' perspectives in a way that may encourage them to stay in an organization that treats them as a means to an end.