Les comportements contre-productifs dans les équipes de travail : les implications d’un manque de soutien organisationnel

Today, work teams hold a particularly important role in organizations and have become essential to the proper functioning of many businesses (Marks, Mathieu, and Zaccaro, 2001). Indeed, according to a study conducted by Kumar (2016), 60% of US companies plan to set up more work teams over the next two years. However, work teams are not a guarantee of success, given that strong variations are typically observed in work teams’ performance levels (Hackman, 2002; Rousseau, Savoie and Battistelli, 2007). Team members’ behaviors are the most direct determinants of team performance. Consequently, in a context where members adopt counterproductive behaviors that hinder teamwork, collective performance necessarily suffers. Although it has been previously established that team counterproductive behaviors hinder the proper functioning and performance of teams (e.g., Aubé, Rousseau, Mama and Morin, 2009; Aubé and Rousseau, 2014; Cole, Walter and Bruch, 2008), their causes are still poorly understood, especially in terms of organizational context factors. Thus, the first objective of this thesis is to clarify the state of knowledge on team counterproductive behaviors and the second objective is to advance knowledge of the contextual antecedents of team counterproductive behaviors. To answer the first objective, a review of the literature of the last twenty years on team counterproductive behaviors was carried out in the first article of this thesis. We thus integrate and advance TCBs scholarship by proposing an integrative model and we help identify and guide where future research efforts related to TCBs should be directed. This first article also clarifies the notion of team counterproductive behaviors and distinguishes them from other types of counterproductive behaviors. In order to address the second objective, namely to advance knowledge about the contextual antecedents of team counterproductive behaviors, the relationship between a supportive organizational context for teams and team counterproductive behaviors was explored. However, before testing this relationship, it was deemed necessary to assess the factor structure of the supportive organizational context for teams’ construct. Indeed, its higher-order multidimensional representation had never been tested. Thus, using a Bifactor-ESEM framework, this study supports the notion that a supportive organizational context for teams is a higher-order construct including four components: rewards, information, educational, and resource allocation systems. Finally, in the third paper, the relationship between a supportive organizational context for teams and team counterproductive behaviors was tested using a sample of 105 work teams from an organization in the field of public safety. Using a path analytic procedure, the results of this study support the mediation model: a lack of organizational support aligned with teamwork triggers negative team affective tone responses at a team level, which then drives the adoption of team counterproductive behaviors. Results also corroborate the moderating role of team commitment in the relationship between negative team affective tone and team counterproductive behaviors.

Keyphrases: Counterproductive Behaviors, Organizational Context, Team Affective Tone, Team Commitment, Work Teams