L'autorisation du télétravail comme acte de confiance
This master’s thesis aims to understand the process leading to an act of trust in an organizational context by studying the decision to authorize teleworking. It explores how managers cross the different stages of the process leading to a state of positive expectations with respect to an employee that allows them to authorize teleworking. From a theoretical point of view, I adopt a dynamic view of trust by mobilizing a processual approach and the concept of suspension (Möllering, 2001, 2006). This study is based on semi-structured interviews conducted with six managers who have authorized teleworking. Participants were interviewed twice and each wrote a short reflection on the theme of trust. Their stories were analyzed inductively. My results show that when a manager plans to authorize teleworking, he or she mobilizes a knowledge bank that has been previously acquired through interactions with the employee to build an optimistic fiction of future. This imaginative exercise allows the manager to suspend his or her uncertainty and anticipate optimistically the behavior of remote workers. Taking the risk represented by the authorization of telework is not only the result of a state of favourable expectations. In large business, this act of trust also seems to be based on a collective suspension of organizational uncertainty and vulnerability.
trust telework risk organization positive expectations