| Summary: | Influenced by the trend for “liberated companies” and “agile mode”, over recent years companies have formulated “empowerment” projects to make their employees more autonomous. These new forms of organization target improved performance, adaptation to the environment and increased individual well-being. The affirmation of such projects invites us to rethink company guidance and the mission of managers. They are accompanied by tensions linked to the permanence of control and the paradoxical injunction to autonomy.For its part, ergonomics is interested in autonomy as a means of responding to various health problems by seeking, through its interventions, to (re)give the operator and the organization the ability to question instructions, based on the requirements of the work activity. With an enabling objective, the intervention aims to lay down the principles of greater subsidiarity within the organization. To achieve this, it is necessary to understand the manager’s activity and his/her decision-making process and cooperation in order to be able to transform, discuss and co-build the source of authority.The examples of two interventions describe the ergonomist’s posture, methods, and participation in the autonomy expansion project. The main results show the difficulty of taking the manager into account and of repositioning him/her, the activity to be deployed to make autonomy possible and the persistence of structural obstacles linked to the difficulties of cooperation and time reconciliation. The ergonomist’s posture supports these trajectories without managing them, by classically seeking to build the conditions for a collective activity that includes the manager.
|
|---|