An Anatomy of Human Dignity; Dissecting the Heart of Humanistic Management

Abstract

Human dignity is introduced in the humanistic management school to distinguish humanistic from economistic perspectives on organizational business practices. Placing human dignity at the core of management leads to a different outlook on doing business, organizing and leading. Within the humanistic management literature, there are several distinct paths to ground human dignity in humanistic management. One school views human dignity as a form of motivation, another focuses on its value-laden components, and still others view human dignity as a form of human development. We introduce relational anthropology as a fourth possibility, emphasizing relationality in the notion of human dignity, with love at its core as the essence of human experience. However, as the experience of human dignity is universally human, culturally specific and extremely personal, interpretations of experienced dignity could be very different for different people. We continue to discuss a cosmopolitan view on human dignity, in which we reject both naïve universalism and lazy relativism, pointing to the challenge of leading moral plurality. We close by summarizing the different approaches to human dignity in a conciliatory framework and outline why we believe an explicit emphasis on qualitative, phenomenological research is the best way forward, bringing love to the stage as the potentially unifying principle for humanistic management.