About psychological submission to work: How a harasser manages to subdue an entire group

In Revue Les Cahiers des Facteurs psychosociaux

Please note:

For ethical reasons, all examples have been carefully anonymized and taken out of context. Any resemblance to a real case would therefore be purely coincidental.

In everyday life, psychosocial risks are generally divided into stress, mental load, dysfunctional work organization, etc. The most serious consequences include burnout and attempted suicide. These two "highlights" of psychosocial disorders often, if not most of the time, have their origin in harassment and terror at work. Since then, I have encountered entire decimated collectives on several occasions during audit missions. The cause? Harassment through terror. Strange work situations that degenerate into totalitarianism... where the law of silence prevails, of everyone withdrawing into themselves, of surveillance by all against all.

Of course, let's not confuse harassment and mistreatment at work. The complex nature of harassment, which cannot be reduced to mistreatment or involuntary violence. Because harassment involves logics of power and group that refer to totalitarianism: totalitarianism of thought where the subject is uprooted in his moral conscience and in his freedom, totalitarianism of instrumentalized action, totalitarianism of human interchangeability, of denunciation, of absolute control. I have also been able to analyze that harassment is an instrument of power that is not legitimate (A. Bilheran, 2009a & b), and must therefore, to lead to obedience, be imposed by force and violence, with the suppression of social ties. We are therefore well beyond the pressures that descend and accumulate in the organization.

It is important to return to this distinction, because the traumatic load in the organization is not similar, nor are the resolution strategies.

So let's start over.

Harassment within the organization develops in a system where imbalances and asymmetries in the distribution of power prevail. In this sense, harassment cannot be reduced to a double trial of perpetrator/victim, to the action of individuals classified as "perverse" on "victims". It must be questioned in collective, institutional and political terms (such as the registration of citizens in a city). Traditionally, it has been agreed to speak of harassment that concerns only an individual A, called the harasser, who has to deal with an individual B, called the harasser. Unfortunately, this is never the case, unfortunately because simple situations are easily manageable. In reality, harassment is always a strictly collective and complex phenomenon.

Likewise, there is not one and only one type of harassment: a boss can be harassed, as can a colleague, and the harassment does not always subside. On the other hand, it is the fruit of those who hold power, whether this power is supposed, symbolic, financial, physical, intellectual, social...

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