Prédire la déviance au travail : les rôles de l’autonomie et du leadership transformationnel

Organizations dealing with deviant employees are not only less enjoyable work environments, they are also less safe and less productive. While various organizational factors have been shown to increase workplace deviance, relatively little is known about the positive practices that could be implemented to actively reduce deviance in the workplace. The main objective of this dissertation is to examine the relations between key factors of the organizational context and interpersonal and organizational deviance. Based on self-determination theory, we postulate that autonomy in the workplace, work motivation, and the organizational social context are of primary importance in the reduction of deviant behaviors. More specifically, two articles explore the role of autonomy at work and management style (i.e., transformational leadership), respectively, in the prediction of workplace deviance.  In the first article, a model is proposed where employees who have more autonomy at work should engage in less organizational deviance. We also investigate the mechanisms underlying this association and postulate that identified motivation mediates this relation. Three studies conducted in a variety of settings (workplaces or laboratory experiments), countries (Canada or Greece), populations (employees or students), and assessment methods (self-reported or objective assessment) showed that employees who experienced more autonomy at work tended to engage in lower levels of organizational deviance. Two studies also showed that this relation was fully mediated by identified motivation. Thus, employees’ experiences of autonomy at work seem to foster higher levels of identified motivation towards work, which in turn predict lower levels of organizational deviance.   In the second article, we examine group and individual level perceptions of transformational leadership (TFL) as negative longitudinal predictors of indirect exposure to person- (e.g., insults/affronts) and work-related psychological violence (e.g., negation/intentional work overload) at work. TFL and workplace violence were also postulated to predict employee psychological need satisfaction (autonomy, competence, and relatedness). Results from multilevel analyses showed that workgroups where managers were perceived to engage in more frequent TFL behaviors reported reduced levels of person- and work-related psychological violence one year later. These associations were observed at the group and individual level. However, TFL did not predict change in psychological need satisfaction one year later at either level of analysis. Finally, although group-level violence did not predict change in need satisfaction one year later, witnessing higher levels of person-related violence than one’s colleagues predicted reduced satisfaction of the need for relatedness one year later at the individual level. These findings identify TFL as a potential managerial strategy to reduce psychological violence in workgroups. The implications of these findings for human resource management are discussed. Future research directions, aimed at increasing knowledge on the role of autonomy in reducing workplace deviance, are also presented.

Keyphrases: Autonomy, Workplace deviance, Transformational leadership, Work motivation, Psychological need satisfaction, Self-determination theory, Counterproductive work behaviors, Psychological violence, Organizations, Identified motivation