Think about the last time you felt like a cog in a machine at work. Maybe a manager treated you as a means to hit a target rather than a person with your own goals and limits. Researchers call this way of seeing others “objectification,” and it is common enough in workplaces that a pair of scholars set out to ask a basic question: why do some supervisors slip into it more than others, and when does that mindset turn into how they actually lead?
A two-study investigation published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior offers evidence that the answer lies partly in how supervisors see themselves. The findings suggest that a boss’s self-image shapes whether they view employees as instruments, and that this view, in turn, is linked to harsher, more controlling leadership under certain conditions.
The gap the researchers wanted to fill
Katerina Tsantila and Frank Walter, both of Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany, noted that most prior research on workplace objectification looked at it from the receiving end, studying what it feels like to be treated as an object. Fewer studies asked why a supervisor develops an objectifying view in the first place, and those that did tended to focus on situational triggers, like holding power over someone. The authors wanted to shift attention to the person doing the objectifying and to the personal traits they bring to the role.
To explain objectification, they need a term worth defining. In organizational settings, objectification means treating employees “more like objects (e.g., means to obtain profit) and less like humans.” The core of the idea is instrumentality: seeing a person mainly as a tool for reaching a goal, and as interchangeable and dispensable. Because employees are, by design, hired partly to help an organization meet its aims, the researchers argue this instrumental view can take hold easily in supervisor-employee relationships.
Three ways of defining the self
The heart of the study rests on an idea from psychology called the self-concept, which describes how people define themselves in relation to others. The authors drew on a framework that splits this into three levels that can coexist within one person.
The individual self-concept describes people who define themselves as separate from others and draw their sense of worth from standing out and coming out ahead in comparisons. The relational self-concept describes people who root their identity in close connections and the quality of their relationships. The collective self-concept describes people who define themselves through membership in larger groups, such as their organization.
The researchers proposed that supervisors with a strong individual self-concept would be more prone to objectifying employees, because a focus on self-interest and personal superiority aligns with viewing others as instruments. They expected the opposite for a strong relational self-concept, since valuing warm connections runs counter to treating people as tools. For the collective self-concept, they left the question open, noting that group focus could either humanize employees as valued team members or depersonalize them as interchangeable parts of a whole.
Adding leader identity into the mix
The study also introduced a second piece of a supervisor’s self-image: leader identity, meaning how central being a leader is to a person’s sense of who they are. The authors reasoned that people tend to act in line with the roles that matter most to them. So a supervisor who strongly identifies as a leader would be more likely to translate an objectifying view of employees into visible leadership behavior, while a supervisor who does not see leadership as central to their identity might hold the same view but act on it less.
They tracked two contrasting leadership styles. Autocratic leadership is directive, controlling, and treats employees as means to an end. Empowering leadership does the reverse, emphasizing employees’ autonomy, development, and shared decision-making.
How the studies were run
The first study surveyed supervisors and employees across various organizations in Germany. After filtering for complete responses, the sample included 65 supervisors and 266 employees, with an average of about four employees rating each supervisor. To reduce bias, supervisors reported on their own self-concepts, objectification tendencies, and leader identity, while employees rated their supervisor’s autocratic leadership.
The second study recruited 196 supervisors in the United States through the online platform Prolific and used a three-wave design, spacing measurements about a week apart. Supervisors reported their self-concepts first, then their objectification and leader identity, and finally their own autocratic and empowering leadership. This design also added empowering leadership as a second outcome and used stronger measurement tools after some scales in the first study showed reliability problems.
What the analysis revealed
Across both studies, supervisors with a stronger individual self-concept reported viewing their employees in more objectifying, instrumental terms. The second and larger study also found that supervisors with a stronger relational self-concept reported less objectification, a link that did not reach significance in the smaller first study. The collective self-concept showed no consistent connection to objectification once the other self-views were taken into account.
The results for leadership behavior were split in a way the authors found telling. Objectification was linked to more autocratic leadership, but this connection held mainly among supervisors who strongly identified as leaders. Among supervisors with a weak leader identity, an objectifying view of employees was not clearly tied to autocratic behavior. Put in plain terms, a boss might see employees as tools, but the study suggests they were more likely to lead in a controlling, dominating way if being a leader was central to their self-image.
The picture for empowering leadership looked different. Objectification was linked to less empowering behavior regardless of how strongly a supervisor identified as a leader. The authors interpret this contrast by suggesting that openly autocratic behavior can violate workplace norms, so supervisors may hold back unless a strong leader identity pushes them to act on their preferences. Withdrawing from empowering behavior, by contrast, may be a quieter, more passive expression of the same underlying view, one that even reluctant leaders can slip into without breaking obvious norms.
Practical takeaways and caveats
The authors suggest their findings carry implications for how organizations select and develop leaders. They argue that companies should be cautious about promoting candidates with an extreme individual self-concept, such as a track record of self-centered or overly competitive behavior, and might give weight to candidates with a strong relational orientation. At the same time, they note that a degree of individual drive can be useful for motivating people to pursue leadership, so they recommend development programs, such as training in empathy and perspective-taking, rather than blanket exclusion.
On leader identity, the researchers are careful not to cast it as a problem to be suppressed. A strong sense of oneself as a leader can drive constructive behaviors too. They suggest organizations instead channel that identity toward productive styles, perhaps by spelling out the damage autocratic behavior can do and highlighting healthier ways to fulfill the role.
Several limits deserve attention. Both studies were observational, so they show associations rather than proof that self-concept causes objectification or that objectification causes particular leadership styles. The first study’s small sample and some weak measurement scales make its null findings hard to read with confidence. The second study relied on supervisors rating their own leadership, which can invite flattering distortions, though the pattern echoed the employee ratings from the first study. Both studies took place in Germany and the United States, where autocratic leadership is generally viewed unfavorably, so the authors note that the links might play out differently in other cultural settings.
