Perceived organizational support and employees’ well-being: the mediating role of organizational dehumanization

ABSTRACT

Perceived organizational support (POS) has been found to predict important organizational outcomes such as increasing employees’ well-being. In this research, we examine a new underlying mechanism of the relationship between POS and employees’ well-being, that is, employees’ perceptions that their organization dehumanizes them. This proposition was tested across two studies. Using an experimental design manipulating POS in a laboratory setting, Study 1 indicated that in the high POS condition, the subsequent feelings of being dehumanized by the organization were lower than in the low POS condition. More importantly, organizational dehumanization perceptions were found to mediate the POS condition and satisfaction link. Furthermore, using a sample of 1209 employees, results of Study 2 indicated that organizational dehumanization mediates the relationship between POS and three indicators of employees’ well-being (i.e., job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and psychosomatic strains). Implications for research on both organizational support theory and dehumanization theory are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Perceived organizational support
• organizational dehumanization
• job satisfaction
• emotional exhaustion
• psychosomatic strains

Acknowledgements

Gaëtane Caesens is a (Aspirant (ASP) = Research Fellow) of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Missing values on the socio-demographic variables were computed using the multiple imputation method in Lisrel.

2. As suggested by an anonymous reviewer, we test the robustness of our model by randomly dividing our sample in two sub-samples and testing our final model in each sub-sample. Results remained essentially the same in the two sub-samples.