Being Treated as an Instrument: Consequences of Instrumental Treatment and Self-Objectification on Task Engagement and Performance

ABSTRACT

Workers’ instrumental treatment is commonly seen as a strategic way to reach organizational goals. Drawing on relevant recent literature, this paper sought to show experimentally that instrumental treatment is instead associated with negative outcomes for the individual and the organization. We sought to demonstrate that treating people as instruments would lead them to self-objectify – to self-perceive as objects rather than human beings – which would result in them being less engaged in a given task, thus undermining their performance. Study 1 was designed to provide a first test of our hypotheses by manipulating the instrumental (vs. non-instrumental) treatment enacted by an experimenter toward naïve participants (N = 85) during the performance of a cognitive task. Study 2 consisted in a simulated online work activity in which participants (N = 147) were asked to play the role of a proofreader for a fictitious newspaper, while being treated in an instrumental (vs. non-instrumental) way by the editorial staff. The results provided convergent evidence about the hypothesized process: being instrumentally (vs. non-instrumentally) treated leads people to self-objectify (i.e., to self-perceive as more instrument-like than human) and, in turn, their engagement with the task and performance are undermined. Implications for organizational and social psychology research are discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability

The datasets for these studies and the Supplementary Materials are available through the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/uy23x/?view_only=d7e30a32f82e472d86e993c44aa69c18). The design and analysis plans were not preregistered. We report all measures, manipulations, and exclusions in these studies.

Ethics statement

These studies were carried out in accordance with the APA ethical guidelines. All participants gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The studies were approved by the ethical commission of the first author’s Institution (protocol RM-2018-120).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ Supplementary Materials and datasets are available through Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/uy23x/?view_only=d7e30a32f82e472d86e993c44aa69c18).

² Both studies included a further measure of self-objectification – that is, the Self-Mental States Attribution scale (SMSA; see Baldissarri et al., 2014). However, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and explorative factor analyses (EFA) led us to eliminate 8 of the 20 items considered in the scale due to cross-loadings. The remaining items saturated into a bi-factorial solution, and discriminant and convergent validity analysis (Gaskin, 2016) showed that they had validity issues. For these reasons, we did not include the scale in the main text of the present paper. The CFA and validity analyses, together with the explorative results including this scale in the hypothesized pattern of findings, are reported in the Supplementary Materials.

³ The original scale considered 5 items for the human-related stimuli. However, the performed CFA and EFA (see Supplementary Materials) showed that the item “someone” did not load properly on the related factor, so we did not consider it in the main analysis. It is important to note that the results that also considered this item for the human score (Study 1: α =.78; Study 2: α =.83) are completely similar to the results given in the present paper.

⁴ For both the studies, we ran additional analyses considering the human and the instrument scores independently. The pattern of results emerged with these new analyses are similar to those presented in the main text (see the Supplementary Materials).