Recent research on flexible office designs have shown that open‐plan and/or flex offices may not have the expected effects in terms of employees’ productivity, well‐being, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and retention. In this article, we propose to consider that the feeling of de‐humanization may explain such dark side of office designs. Adopting a mixed methods approach, we administrated a quantitative survey to 534 employees working in a variety of office designs, and conducted 12 semi‐structured interviews among the respondents to the survey in order to investigate how they experienced their office designs, notably in terms of de‐humanization. Results showed that the three specific office designs under study (i.e. cell, open‐plan, and flex offices) are associated with different levels of de‐humanization and that this feeling of de‐humanization mediates their impact on employees’ job satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, extra‐role performance, psychological strains, and turnover intentions. Interviews’ analysis reveals three main mechanisms in the development of the feeling of de‐humanization in such office designs: a triple feeling of dispossession (of space, voice and professional mastery), a feeling of abandon and an injunction to adopt a modern behaviour.

中文翻译：

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办公室设计的阴暗面：走向非人性化

最近有关灵活办公室设计的研究表明，开放式办公室和/或灵活办公室在员工的生产力，幸福感，工作满意度，组织承诺和保留方面可能没有预期的效果。在本文中，我们建议考虑非人性化的感觉可以解释办公设计的这种阴暗面。我们采用混合方法，对534名从事各种办公室设计工作的员工进行了定量调查，并在调查的受访者中进行了12次半结构化访谈，以调查他们对办公室设计的感受，特别是在以下方面：非人性化。结果表明，正在研究的三种特定的办公室设计（即单元，开放式，和弹性办公室）与不人道化程度不同有关，这种不人化的感觉调解了其对员工工作满意度，情感上的组织承诺，角色外绩效，心理压力和离职意图的影响。访谈的分析揭示了这种办公室设计中非人性化感觉发展的三种主要机制：三分不清的占有感（空间，声音和专业掌控感），被抛弃的感觉和采用现代行为的禁令。