The future of work is a topic that has received a considerable amount of attention in the last decade, especially with regard to the increasing use of advanced technology. Although organizations can benefit in many ways from technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), they will also face many new challenges, such as the potential objectification and dehumanization of employees. As a result, leaders of the future must find ways to combat and minimize the potentially negative and harmful effects of technology on employees and their other stakeholders.

In a recent paper, Jamie Gruman (University of Guelph) and I argue that the future of work (FoW) is likely to generate dehumanizing changes to organizational cultures that can only be mitigated in one way: through the deliberate introduction of care. We show that building caring organizations will reduce the dehumanizing effects of technology, promote employee health and well-being and facilitate organizational success.

The antidote to depersonalization

The FoW is a term used to capture ongoing trends and changes in the workplace, with a primary focus on the effects of technology and automation on jobs, corporate strategy and the organization of work. To date, research in this area has been dominated by technical issues such as automation and digitization, but it also addresses themes that are social and demographic (e.g. burnout, work-life conflict) and economic (e.g. wage inequality, precarity). One issue that will become particularly important in the new world of work is the need for greater care and concern in and around organizations. We believe care can serve as a vital antidote to the impersonal technological forces that are expected to dominate the workplaces of the future.

Although new technology brings many benefits, it also presents challenges, one of which involves the objectification and dehumanization of employees that technology promotes. Objectification involves perceiving and treating people as objects, while dehumanization involves perceiving a person as lacking attributes such as maturity and warmth that define what it means to be human and distinguish people from animals and machines. As AI, robotics and hyperconnectivity continue to proliferate, impersonal operations and procedures are likely to become normative, creating work environments that value depersonalized action such as firing employees over e-mail. In such environments, employees risk being regarded as just another piece of technology to be leveraged.

Another trend fostering the objectification of employees is the growing reliance on data in organizations. As contemporary organizations have focused increasingly on people analytics and mining data, interest has shifted from the humans who do the work to data around what they do during working hours (e.g. how many e-mails they sent today). Focusing on "employees as data" runs the risk of depersonalizing the people who make up companies, reducing them to the level of interchangeable objects.

Whereas technology can be depersonalizing and objectifying, care involves satisfying people’s unique needs and is thus highly personalized and attuned to employees as individuals. Care can thus serve to counterbalance the effects of technology and ensure that the needs and well-being of employees and other stakeholders remain a top priority.

Shaping the "future of work"

Managers and employees are not passive recipients of the trends affecting the FoW: They can play an active role in shaping it. Constructs that include care — such as social support — engender positive emotions and well-being and can serve as a countervailing force to the disruption caused by changes to work processes, skill requirements and job design provoked by technology. We therefore suggest that organizations prepare for the FoW by building a culture of care.

Our focus on care is consistent with “humanistic management” — otherwise known as the human relations movement — which involves concern for the human aspects of managing organizations. This mindset is oriented not only to obtaining results through people, but above all, towards people themselves and their flourishing and well-being. Humanistic management builds on a central theme of humanism involving the promotion of human dignity. While the concept of care is not new in humanistic management, until now it has largely been implicit. We believe the time has come to make it explicit due to its ability to address contemporary work issues.

Partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, workplace change has been hastened in recent years. In their survey of HR leaders, knowledge workers and their managers on how the pandemic affected the FoW, researchers reported that workplace relationships have changed and employees now expect managers to have a positive impact on their life experience — not just their work experience.

In this new world of work, managers must build different kinds of relationships with employees and base those relationships on empathy. Organizations and managers must care about their workforce as whole people. We contend that the cultures of successful organizations of the future will reflect not only what it means to be an effective worker, but also what it means to be a fully functioning human being who is cared for at work.

Organizational culture can be defined as: A pattern of basic assumptions developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, is to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems.

Culture is manifested at three different levels:

• Artifacts refer to visible features such as architecture, language, art, clothing, stories, behaviour, published statements and rituals. Items at this level of culture are easy to observe but hard to understand because on their own, their meaning is difficult to discern.
• Beliefs and values refer to views that can be articulated about ‘the way things should be’ and include ideals, goals, aspirations, ideologies and rationalizations. Beliefs and values become shared through a process of social validation which confirms and reinforces their validity through the shared experience of a group.
• Underlying basic assumptions refer to shared, taken-for-granted premises about ‘the way the world works.’ They are unspoken, generally not questioned or disputed, arouse anxiety and defensiveness when challenged and are therefore difficult to change. Assumptions concern fundamental aspects of life, such as the nature of truth and how we discover it; the correct way for the individual and the group to relate to each other; and the relative importance of work, family and self-development. Assumptions influence behaviour and the perceptions, thoughts and feelings on which they are based.

The most fundamental feature of any culture is the third element: a set of basic assumptions. Appreciating foundational assumptions is integral to understanding and transforming a culture. Thus, building a culture of care involves cultivating assumptions that care is an important, esteemed, fundamental aspect of organizational life. Such assumptions supply the basis for values and artifacts that reflect care and serve to integrate care into the fabric of an organization.

The research on creating and shaping organizational cultures emphasizes the role of leadership. Leaders who value care will act in ways that demonstrate and celebrate it, thus allowing it to cascade through the organization, and their behaviour will send signals about the value of care as a foundational assumption.

Due to the continued proliferation of technology, the FoW might be dominated by cultures in which employees’ basic assumptions and behavioural repertoires focus increasingly on employees as ‘exploitable resources.’ In contrast, in organizations that cultivate a culture of care, perceiving, valuing and acting upon notions of care will become part of employees’ toolkits, and caring thoughts and behaviours will come to be included in their behaviour.

A multiple stakeholder perspective

While the effects of increasing technology are most likely to impact workers, the effects will also be felt by customers and society. Thus, to be truly caring, organizations of the future need to consider all stakeholders who have an exchange relationship with them.

While most studies have defined care in terms of the organization caring for employees, we advocate for a much broader and holistic definition in which care stems from each stakeholder of the organization to other stakeholders. We define care as follows: The extent to which an organization and its stakeholders have an awareness and concern for the needs and well-being of each other and take concrete actions to fulfill each other’s needs and ensure their well-being.

Several studies have demonstrated the importance of manifesting a dual concern for employees and customers. In a study of 594 stores of a large retail company, a concern for employee and customer climates was positively related to employee service performance and, in turn, to store financial performance. Another study that looked at 133 stores in Taiwan found that a high-performance work system (HPWS) was positively related to both a climate of concern for employees and a climate of concern for customers. Further, a climate of concern for employees mediated the relationship between HPWS and employee helping behaviour, a climate of concern for customers mediated the relationship between HPWS and employee service performance, and both service performance and helping behaviour were positively related to business unit market performance.

We suggest a multiple-stakeholder perspective of organizational care that includes four primary stakeholder groups: management, employees, customers and the community in which the organization operates. A caring organization is one that takes actions to address the needs of these primary stakeholders with the objective of ensuring their collective well-being and builds cultural assumptions and repertoires of action to support this endeavour.

The act of caring is a process that involves four elements:

• Attentiveness involves an awareness of the need for caring and the needs of oneself and others;
• Responsibility involves assuming responsibility for taking care of a need that has been identified and being accountable for the consequences;
• Competence involves meeting the caring needs and performing caring tasks; and
• Responsiveness refers to the response by the care receiver regarding the care that has been received and whether their needs have been met.

In a caring culture, the organization and stakeholders will be attentive, responsible, competent and responsive to each other’s needs. A caring organization will be aware of the needs of managers, employees, customers and the community and will build a culture to engage in caring tasks to meet their needs.

For example, many organizations have community volunteering programs wherein employees perform service and outreach to communities in need, as well as corporate community investment (CCI) programs that promote quality-of-life improvements. CCI refers to the obligation firms have to try, often outside of their primary economic role, to improve society and offset any negative impacts of their operations.

How to manifest care

As indicated, in a caring culture, each stakeholder receives and returns care to the other stakeholders. The manner in which care moves up, down, around and outside of an organization can be explained in terms of three mechanisms:

The trickle-down effect. The main premise of the trickle-down effect is that the attitudes and behaviours of management at higher levels of an organization ‘trickle down’ and influence those at lower levels. Although most research has demonstrated how positive aspects of management can influence employees at lower levels, there is also evidence that negative attitudes and behaviours can trickle down from managers to supervisors and from supervisors to employees.

One way for leaders to initiate trickle-down effects that institutionalize care is to actively avoid using objectifying terminology in their correspondence and speech so that employees don’t feel depersonalized and treated like data. Through trickle-down processes, the use of respectful terminology — an artifact of a caring culture — is likely to circulate through the organization. The use of terminology that demonstrates care might also be imitated by other stakeholders and spread beyond the organization, highlighting how a caring culture can spread up, down, around and outside the organization.

Social exchange theory. According to this theory and the norm of reciprocity, individuals develop obligations towards others in which they feel obligated to help those who have helped them. Thus, employees ‘trade’ their effort and loyalty for various benefits and resources that they receive from their organization. This is the basis of "Organizational Support Theory," which argues that perceived organizational support (POS) produces a felt obligation to care about the organization’s welfare and to help the organization reach its objectives through greater effort, commitment, continued participation and performance. In other words, care begets care.

One way that organizations can foster caring social exchange relationships and a norm of reciprocity is by making clear to employees that any technology-based systems they implement are transparent and free from bias. Employees should also have some influence over the process and outcomes of technology-based systems in order to avoid inadvertent ‘algorithmic cruelty,’ which occurs when algorithms produce outcomes that, if produced by humans, would be considered thoughtless and insensitive — such as automatically penalizing an employee for being late when they had a family emergency.

Emotional contagion. Emotional contagion involves the transfer of moods or emotions from person to person or the transfer of moods and emotions among those in a group. Thus, employees can "catch" the emotions, attitudes and behaviours of their coworkers. This can take place in small groups or larger collectives, and it can influence what people feel as well as what they think and do. Research on emotional contagion has found that it can influence team dynamics, leadership, employee and customer attitudes and satisfaction, decision-making as well as attitudinal, cognitive and behavioural outcomes. For example, the emotions of frontline employees can be transmitted to customers, which can influence customer satisfaction.

A similar phenomenon is known as "crossover," which occurs when the psychological well-being of one person influences the well-being of another. Several studies have found crossover effects for work engagement. For example, one study found that work engagement crosses over from one employee to another employee on a daily basis, especially when employees have frequent interactions and communications with each other. Both team-level burnout and work engagement were related to individual team members’ burnout and work engagement. Another study found that the engagement of group members converged over time, especially when the most engaged group member was highly engaged. Thus, group members can "catch" each other’s engagement.

Given these findings, similar outcomes can be expected with caring. The caring that employees receive from their manager can spill over and make them more caring towards each other and other members of the organization, as well as customers and clients. Through crossover and contagion processes, the positive emotions and well-being that participation generates will transfer throughout and potentially beyond the organization.

In combination, these three mechanisms lead to a cascade of caring and further develop an organizational culture of care manifested in the values, assumptions and toolkits of organizational members.

The consequences of caring

The positive consequences of caring can be explained by three processes or mechanisms: social exchange theory (discussed above), positive emotions and organizational identification. Let’s take a closer look at the latter two.

Positive emotions. These can be discrete emotional states or episodes (e.g. joy, love, happiness) or the general experience of feeling positive. Research shows that such emotions build personal resources and psychological resilience — triggering upward spirals that enhance health and well-being. Positive emotions have been found to be associated with a number of work outcomes such as self-efficacy beliefs, creativity, work engagement, health, customer satisfaction, and task and contextual performance.

The effect of positive emotions on organizational outcomes is due to four mechanisms: cognitions, behaviours, affect and physiology. Put simply, positive emotions produce changes in cognition, behaviour, affect (emotion) and physiology that result in positive personal and social resources that contribute to work outcomes.

Various events and experiences can produce positive emotions at work. For example, researchers found that POS was associated with a positive mood and a positive mood mediated the relationship between POS and affective organizational commitment and organizational spontaneity. Similarly, we contend that care and concern from an organization and its members will produce positive emotions, and these positive emotions will produce positive attitudes and behaviour.

Organizational identification. Caring and concern can be expected to fulfill stakeholders’ socio-emotional needs such as approval, affiliation, emotional support and esteem, which will lead to the development of a strong identification with the organization. Thus, stakeholders will incorporate their membership and association with the organization into their social identity and feel emotionally bound to the organization.

Organizational identification is a cognitive construct that involves the congruence of individual and organizational values and a perception of oneness or belongingness to the organization. For organizational members, it means that they have linked their membership in the organization with their self-concept.

A meta-analysis of organizational identification found that it is positively related to a number of work attitudes, behaviours and job performance. We therefore expect that a culture of care will lead to stronger organizational identification, which will then lead to a variety of positive work outcomes.

The FoW is a double-edged sword: Advances in automation might provide the time and opportunity for people to build organizational cultures of care while simultaneously dehumanizing them. We submit that building a culture of care is an intentional decision that can offer significant strategic and operational advantages.

The good news is that the future of work is malleable. It is possible to make it more caring. Organizations that develop a caring culture in which the needs and well-being of all stakeholders are a priority are most likely to succeed in the future and benefit employees, customers and the communities they serve.

The paper on which this article is based was published in the European Management Review. This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Rotman Management magazine. If you enjoyed this article, consider subscribing to the magazine or to the Rotman Insights Hub bi-weekly newsletter.