Leading and Learning Through Safety
Leading and Learning Through Safety
Episode 199: Re-humanizing the Organization
In the first episode of Leading & Learning Through Safety for 2026, Dr. Mark French explores a challenging but critical topic: organizational dehumanization and its direct impact on leadership, safety, and human dignity at work. Drawing from a December 2025 Journal of Applied Psychology article titled “Seeing the Good in the Bad: A Self-Affirmation Model for Organizational Dehumanization,” the episode examines whether any redeeming outcomes can exist in workplaces that treat people as numbers rather than humans.
Dehumanization often shows up subtly—viewing employees as spreadsheet entries, productivity metrics, or cost centers instead of people with autonomy, competence, and emotional needs. Dr. French argues that this mindset is fundamentally incompatible with safety. When people are dehumanized, organizations lose autonomous thinkers, silence risk-spotters, and erode the trust required to protect one another.
Interestingly, the research suggests that while dehumanization is never appropriate or acceptable, some individuals respond by seeking meaning elsewhere—through volunteering, social connection, or prosocial behavior outside of work. This “rebound effect” is not a justification for poor leadership, but a testament to human resilience and self-affirmation.
The episode also explores an important nuance: not all language that removes “human” framing is harmful. Being called “a machine” for exceptional performance may feel motivating in context—but systemic dehumanization that strips dignity is something entirely different.
Dr. French closes with a call to action: safety begins with re-humanization. Leaders must recognize the signs of dehumanization and intentionally restore autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Because when we value people as people, safety becomes possible—and sustainable.
This week on the podcast, we're talking about dehumanization, something we've talked about before. We're going to explore that in a little bit more detail, thanks to an article that I came across this week on the podcast. You mark,
Announcer:welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French. You
Mark French:welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am so excited to welcome you into the first podcast of 2026 I am excited to be part of your podcast rotation, and, yeah, glad to have another year ahead of us. I always enjoy it, even though it's just another day. It feels like a fresh start. Every New Year kicks that off. And I think this year is no different, and this year, you know, I think the podcast will remain mostly the same, but I'm excited to see where we're going to go together as we take this journey into how do we really look at safety in the workplace and the leadership that it requires to be really and truly effective. So this week came across a really interesting article. This came from the Journal of Applied Psychology, one of the ones I cite the most from the December 2025 issue. And the article is seeing the good in the bad, self affirmation model for organizational dehumanization. That's a mouthful. What this article is looking at is in an organization that dehumanizes its people. Can there actually be any good at all? Is there any salvageable good from an organization that dehumanizes its people, and they run through a couple of experiments, looking at core values, self affirmation, looking for ways that are Is there anything that actually allows people to feel less dehumanized or find other ways to cope in an organization where dehumanization exists in the article, there's a lot of ways that people can be dehumanized. When I think about dehumanization, I think about looking at people from a spreadsheet, and I've talked about that before, that when you look at people as a spreadsheet, as a number, as $1 amount, rather than as real people, it can get in the way of making good, ethical decisions for safety and dehumanization in a lot of places becomes the the opposite of safety. It is, it is the antagonist of safety, because suddenly we don't care about that human we put them in situations that we wouldn't put other humans into, because we've dehumanized in this article, what they're looking at is, is there any redeemable value? Is there anything that, if someone has good core values, has strong self affirmation, has a strong self esteem? What does the workplace do to those people? Now, the findings are relative. They do a lot of really interesting data analysis and some of the questionnaires, the studies that they're doing, and I won't go into a lot of detail there, ultimately, it comes down to the individual and the relative scale of what is self affirmation. How good do you feel about yourself, and what coping mechanisms have you created in your life? What. What the article ultimately comes down to, says that a workplace may dehumanize people, but in some cases, people respond to that adversity and they go and seek things outside of work that give them joy. Now that seems very normal, but in some cases, it motivates people to be Now, I do want to read one section. I'll verbatim read this from their research, because it's the truth of the research, and they don't want to. There was no point in this research that they said that dehumanizing people is a good thing, so I'll read this, and what it says is we reiterate that our research does not advocate for dehumanization dehumanizing organizational practices. Even though we showed that such practices may sometimes result in pro social behavior, we make no normative statement about the legitimacy and appropriateness of organizational dehumanization. So ultimately, they do say, Don't dehumanize your people. Don't do it. But if you are in a situation of that, there may be ways to cope in the meantime, even though the organization is not what it should be, by no means. And what they showed is that it actually could increase pro outside of work, social behavior, that in some cases, it showed an increase in volunteering, an increase in socialization. It was almost a rebound effect that, you know, I feel treated so bad that I need to go out and do something good for the world, because I can see that the the organization I walked into isn't doing that for anyone. So I am going to to basically rebel. I'm going to be I'm going to fight the adversity, and even though, yeah, I can't fight it in my organization, I'm going to go out into the public and I'm going to do something good, because it makes me feel better. And it also, in a way, it shows that there is good out there. Again, it shows it can happen and it does happen. But ultimately, what it shows is a lot of really strong research in the background that they look at about what is dehumanization of people. And I have never thought of it in some ways that they present it, and that's where I want to start. The conversation is, what is dehumanization? That is a very, very broad term, and I have used it in most cases, in a very narrow scope. And let me give you the example. So I, as I said before, always link dehumanization to making a human$1 amount. Figuring out how we get rid of the dollar amount, how do we reduce the dollar amount, how do we get more value from that dollar amount, which is really a negative standpoint, from all human motivation, all human self affirmation theory, it's not a good way to be. It shows that we truly do not care about people. There are times, though, in the broad sense of dehumanization, that we like it. And here's the example, if I am really good at my job, and I am cranking things out, I'm getting the work done, someone may come up to me, High five me, and go, you are a machine. You are getting it done, and I will be as proud as can be for that compliment. In that compliment is inherently dehumanizing, because suddenly I'm not a human. I'm a machine. And I loved it. I love the fact that I've been I am the machine. That example comes up that there are some organizations and some people that dehumanize but can do it in a positive way. So I at least wanted to acknowledge that that exists out there, that dehumanization in a very pure, literal form is not inherently bad. Where I want to go now is I'm going to narrow my scope back to where most of us look at and where most organizations move to, and that is dehumanizing to the point of where it is obscene, to where we are not worthy of the human rights and human dignity that the workplace should afford. That is more inherent to where the research went and it looked at some of the notions of what happens when we do have a high self affirmation. We believe in ourselves we are, we know that we break. Value, and we're in a position where we are working, we're doing the job. The job is exactly what it is the job, and what are those coping mechanisms that come from doing that style of work? Let's come back to that in the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, you are listening to
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Mark French:Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, looking at this journal article from the Journal of Applied Psychology. They talk about the consequences the in this is the research base of outside of their before they do their experimentation to see if there is any fleeting good that could come from it. But what are the overall consequences of dehumanization in an organization? And of course, they're mostly they're negative. The research has shown time and time again that when we remove the human factor, when we take away the fact that humans need motivation, that humans need certain socialization, that they need certain affirmation, and to think about how much time we spend in Our organization, as a worker, as a person in the organization. It's a lot of time that that influence is upon us, that we're feeling it in a very real way. And so what they say is that ultimately, organizational dehumanization from from a lot of research sources that are fairly recent say that employees feel like it thwarts their fundamental psychological need for autonomy, competence and relatedness when I'm no longer human to you as an organization, theoretically, you organization, I am no longer human. I no longer want to be autonomous. I don't want to think for myself. I'll just do what you tell me. I'll just crank it out like you want. I will reduce my competence. I'm no longer going to be the thinker. I'm just going to be the doer in relatedness. I'm not going to relate to you. I'm not going to buy into your values. I'm not going to buy into anything that you're giving me, because I'm not human, and as a non human, I don't do those things. And when it comes to a safe atmosphere, when it comes to creating safety, protection of people, we need those things. We need autonomous thinkers, someone who will see the risk, call the risk for themselves and others. We need people who are competent to say the work we're doing right now is unsafe. We have to change and then relatedness, to relate to each other, to be able to say those things to each other as a team, to protect the team, to protect each other. The value of human life now, one is inherent to the other. If an organizational, organization is dehumanizing, safety is probably not anything they care about. There may be some great posters and slogans around that they slapped up, but one definitely leads to the other, and the other negative outcomes of this increased emotional exhaustion for people, of course, turnover, where people can leave, they will leave. And I'm reminded of some news stories, of some really large organizations that were putting like during covid time, where a lot of people were working remotely, they were installing what I would almost call spyware into company computers to where it was key logging and looking at how much productivity time in what was interesting is they would always talk about the people who abused it. But overall, there were some studies that showed that productivity was actually higher during those times, that people, even without those those secret motivations, that they were more productive because they were able to work in an autonomous way. They're able to create their own humanity being away from the deep. Dehumanizing office corporate culture. Now, not all Office corporate cultures are dehumanizing. That's not what I'm saying. But in the cases that really started to come out of that, it showed some really dubious effects, some really sad methodology of organizations and companies. So this dehumanizing effect, it has such a strong place in our work, and how it spills over into so much more in our work, in our life. And so what I want to say to this is that, if in the places where this may be happening, or maybe it's an individual or a supervisor, or maybe it's not fully organizational, the thing we can do in the meantime is, if is one talk about, socialize, do good work that makes you feel good as an individual. Continue to continue to flex your own individuality, your own core values, your own purpose, your own mission. Continue to let that shine, even during some work that is causing it to feel like you're not human. It's important that we keep that, that we continue to keep the self, and that we don't allow the organization to reduce our sense of self. Now that is pie in the sky. That's a lot of theoretical. I want to get right down to what that means is that don't give up, continue to do the right thing, even though it can be the tough thing, and I'm and that's easier said than done. I get it because there are times where, yeah, I personally have a tendency of when things get like that, I fade like I start to blend into the surroundings. I become camouflage, and I retreat internal, and I just become my own. And just like I'm going to entertain myself, and it's a circus inside my head while all the other terrible things are happening, I don't want to do that as much. I want to try to get out there. And it reminds me of like when you're feeling low or down, you go to someone else and you you compliment them, you try to make their day better, you try to get a smile from them, and that energy then reflects back to you from where we are in a safety standpoint, dehumanizing is absolutely the last thing we need to do to create safety. So if we're wanting to create safety in the workplace, step one is to recognize the signs, to recognize when we're dehumanizing someone, and how do we bring the human back into the situation? How do we re humanize? And I've used that word a couple of times is, how do we re humanize our workplace? How do we start to recognize the people again, so that we focus on those behaviors, of creating that safety for our team, so that they can grow, so they can be autonomous, great thinkers, great workers. It's how we engage and it's how we lead. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Welcome to 2026 I am glad you are here with me. I am glad we are continuing this journey of leadership and safety, and Until next time we chat, stay safe.
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