Ethical stakes of corporate governance, ergonomic contribution to organizational redesign aiming at subsidiarity

Bernard Dugué (1) , Johann Petit (1)

1 COGNITIQUE

Corporate governance, through the involvement of employees and the dynamics that it can produce, is an essential precondition for efficiency and for safeguarding workers' health. Many studies have shown that individual autonomy is a determining factor in implementing occupational health. Employees must be allowed a certain amount of room for maneuver in organizing their work (e.g. varying their modes of operation), they must be able to show their creativity (not be satisfied with applying procedures that have been defined by others), and influence their work environment, especially in periods of change. Organizational design should provide the opportunity to influence management modes, distribution of power, the functioning of the chain of command, individual participation in the design processes. Ultimately, this is a question of areas for deliberation and the allocation of decision-making power. Contrary to the idea of a predetermined definition of all the decisions that can be taken at every level of the hierarchy, efficiency consists in constantly adapting the level of decisionmaking to the problem being dealt with. This requires constructing an organization which is sensitive to details of events, which can be always adjusting the levels at which matters are dealt with. However, this swing from one decision level to another is only possible if the organization and the people within it are well prepared beforehand. Thus the concept of subsidiarity constitutes an ethical point of reference for dealing with questions of corporate governance. It favors decision-making at the lowest appropriate level by following three organizing principles: the competency principle, the assistance principle, and the substitution principle. Small businesses can be an accessible framework for a systemic approach to these questions and an excellent setting for organizational experimentation.

Domaines: Sciences cognitives

Bernard Dugué, Johann Petit. Ethical stakes of corporate governance, ergonomic contribution to organizational redesign aiming at subsidiarity. Understanding Small Enterprises (USE) Conference 2013, Feb 2013, Nelson, New Zealand. pp.79-86. ⟨hal-00879719⟩