Renouveau & Démocratie - Marie Pezé & Nicolas Viard - Institutional psychological harassment
Channel: Renouveau et Démocratie
Date: 2021-06-24

Institutional psychological harassment, when work organisation and pathogenic management push the victim to extremes! with Marie PEZE, Doctor of Psychology, psychoanalyst, former legal expert, Head of the “Souffrance et travail” consultation network and Maître Nicolas VIARD
From the “l’Atelier des Droits”, law firm founded by Maître Rachel SAADA, Lawyer at the Paris Bar, former staff representative and trade unionist. He followed the France Telecom case 

Pathogenic management practices and suffering at work
There are several forms of moral harassment: individual harassment, transversal or horizontal harassment and institutional harass¬ment. Institutional harassment is one of the consequences of pathogenic management as well as of certain work organisation arrange¬ments.
There are several forms of moral harassment: individual harassment, transversal or horizontal harassment and institutional harass¬ment. Institutional harassment is one of the consequences of pathogenic management as well as of certain work organisation methods.
Among the elements constituting pathogenic management, there are punitive practices that put the agent in a situation of constant jus¬tification by destroying the recognition of work, paradoxical injunctions by setting objectives without giving the means, permanent reor¬ganisations destabilising the personnel and participating in the loss of the meaning of work, the staging of disappearance by removing tasks to entrust them to someone else without valid justification, by erasing the colleague from the organisation chart, com¬munication that is almost exclusively downward….
And then there are all the different forms of misuse: the misuse of managerial authority by setting objectives without providing the means, the misuse of organisational authority by arbitrarily modifying the working conditions or the essential attributions of the workplace, the misuse of the subordination relationship by refusing to dialogue, by insidious or insulting remarks, by denigration…
These are all elements recognised by experts as pathogenic management practices that inevitably produce psychosocial risks.

Pathogenic management and psychosocial risks (PSR)
PSRs are defined as risks to mental, physical and social health, generated by employment conditions and organisational and relational factors likely to interact with mental functioning.
They generate suffering at work, linked to the professional activity, such as stress, violence, harassment, burnout, discrimi¬nation and sometimes the worst happens: the victim commits suicide.
Marie Pezé will present the different types of harassment, focusing on institutional harassment and the associated pathologies.
Mr Nicolas Viard will share with us the lessons to be learned from the France Télécom case that he followed before the French courts and where a wave of suicides occurred as a result of pathogenic management methods as recognised by the judgments that sen¬tenced three former managers to one year in prison, eight months of which were suspended, the other defendants being found guilty of complicity in harassment

R&D called on these experts not only to assist the colleagues but also to include the notion of pathogenic management and institutional harassment in the negotiations on the harassment decision.