Quand l’organisation empêche un travail de qualité : étude de cas

• Main Authors: Johann Petit, Bernard Dugué
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institut de Recherche Robert-Sauvé en Santé et en Sécurité du Travail (IRSST) 2012-08-01
• Series: Perspectives Interdisciplinaires sur le Travail et la Santé
• Subjects: service sector; intervention; work quality; health; hindered activity
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/pistes/3419

Health problems at work often originate in the operators’ activities. Work intensification, increasing pressures, greater physical, cognitive, and psychic workloads, and contradictory demands oblige employees to make choices which are not always satisfactory and which could be at the origin of their PSRs and MSDs. Good quality work, which makes them unique and identifies them as skillful professionals from their colleagues’, customers’, and management’s viewpoint, is at stake. When an organization prevents operators from doing a “good job,” the risks for their physical and psychic health increase. Based on an intervention in the banking sector, we try to show how reorganization can push operators to cut back on a “qualitatively significant” part of their activity and can have negative consequences on their work and health. In such a case, the most likely ergonomic options would be to try to change the organization.