Introduction
This search proposes to study the influence of type of management on social representation of well-being at work. More precisely, we wanted to know if working in a company which involve employees in its operation have an influence on well-being at work. Today, working isn’t a simple activity to earn money to live. Working is present in our daily life, we spend it a lot of time and energy. More than that, working is a value in our society. Be jobless is a factor of risk for developing mental trouble (Cohidon, Imbernon, & Gorldberg, 2009). Working participate in identity construction of every individual. (Bevort, 2013). Therefore, it’s a societal challenge to combine well-being and work ! It’s a model that proposes to put in place a new form of management : the freedom-form company.
Hypothesis
The aim of the study is to identify if the type of management have an influence on worker’s social representations of well-being at work. The main hypothesis is that working in a free-form company have an influence on the social representation of well-being at work. Then, we suppose that the type of job position have an influence on the social representation too. Finally, according to Baggio and Sutter (2008), the third hypothesis is that the social representation of well-being at work is mostly a positive perception.
Methodology
We have compared two populations : workers in a classic company and workers in a free form company. A free form company is a society in which employees are equals, there is no hierarchy. Furthermore, the employees take part of decisions in their jobs. In order to control the influence of participant’s type of job position on results, analysis were duplicated with this variable. For this variable, two conditions were defined based on the type of position, an office position or a field position. The study population is composed by 90 workers, 50 working in a free form company and 40 working in a classic company. The participants passed a test of free association about « well-being at work ». The participants had to give five to eight words that came to their mind when they were told « well-being at work ». Then, they had to assign a valence to these words (positive, negative or neutral). At last, they had to reclassify them in order of importance. We conducted a prototypical and a categorical analysis to identify the structures and thematic in different socials representations.
Results
The results show that the type of management has no significant effect on social representation of well-being at work. The results also didn’t show any significant effect of the type of job position on this social representation. However, we can note some trends : the social relation at work is the main subject in these social representation. The concept of human requirement is stronger in the free form company condition and the notion of organizational and physical characteristics is stronger in the classic condition.
Key words : Well-being, Well-being at work, social representation, Free form management, Management
507 words
Words I have learned :
Free-form company : entreprise libérée
To involve : impliquer
Trends : tendances
A field position : un poste de terrain
Bibliography :
Baggio, S., & Sutter, P. É. La valeur travail en France: pensée positivement par 66% des salariés, 2008.
Bevort, A. (2013). De Taylor au néo-management : quelle participation des salariés ? Participations, 5(1), 33. https://doi.org/10.3917/parti.005.0033
Cohidon, C., Imbernon, E., Gorldberg, M. (2009). Prevalence of common mental disorders and their work consequences in France, according to occupational category. American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 52(2), 141152. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajim.20656