Organizational Dehumanization as a Predictor of Unethical Workplace Behavior
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite a general tendency to value morality, employees often engage in self-interested unethical workplace behavior that has the potential to harm their own organization. Drawing on social cognitive theory, the present research contributes to our understanding of this phenomenon by proposing that organizational dehumanization can serve as a specific mechanism of moral disengagement in organizational settings. More precisely, whereas employees typically anthropomorphize their organization (i.e., attribute human qualities to it), we propose that dehumanizing one’s organization (i.e., denying it human qualities) can facilitate unethical workplace behavior by reducing one’s anticipatory guilt for such behavior. Hypotheses were supported across two studies with different methodologies. Theoretically, this research answers repeated calls in the literature to identify a specific mechanism of moral disengagement that can account for unethical behavior in organizational settings, highlights how moral disengagement processes can be initiated and facilitate unethical workplace behavior, and advances our understanding of organizational anthropomorphism as a motivated phenomenon. Practically, this research offers insight into the relationship between anthropomorphism and morality, and identifies a novel potential strategy for reducing unethical behavior in organizational settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".