Humanism and management

Workplace relations have deteriorated considerably in economically wealthy countries as the social pact that supported them has been transformed.
Wage labor based on hierarchical relationships as we still know it was organized with industrialization and the liberal system; it is a paternalistic system, where everyone found a place to the extent that they agreed to be dominant, the boss, or submissive, the employee. The contract is based on an exchange between time, that which the employee devoted to his work, and security, offered by the boss, or the leader in return.

However, for various reasons too numerous to describe here, the evolution of systems has led to a questioning of the security clause and this very quickly, in less than 50 years which is not much in terms of Man's capacity for change: our "submissive" is no longer able to find his way because everything can change, performance and profitability requiring permanent adaptation to merciless global competition.

But this evolution has also caused the dilution of the notion of boss, which has become a manager, that is to say, a manager, and everyone is more or less someone else's boss. The notion of a personalized leader has been diluted into that of hierarchy, a somewhat vague concept that justifies all decision-making since there is no longer a clearly designated manager. On the other hand, everyone has become responsible, if not for their actions, at least for what happens to them: not fast enough, not trained enough, not young enough, not old enough, in short, not profitable enough.
So in a short time, half a century, relationships within organizations have changed, with both positive and negative implications.

On the positive side, we are moving towards the empowerment of men in their professional context, even if this is achieved with forceps and slowly. Indeed, the submissive profile tends to disappear since they became managers, which makes them gradually realize that they can make decisions. They no longer really want to devote their time to a professional life that subjects them to a lot of pressure. But, their need for security being still present, they remain subject no longer to their boss but to the objectives that have been set for them. They still have the same fear, that of exclusion from the group. And the higher one climbs in the hierarchy, the more the level of fear and submission increases. Probably because the feeling of losing a lot is strong. However, some of them, the alternative ones, tired of being subjected to pressure whose objective is economic performance to the detriment of human values, are precursors of what is slowly being established: more autonomous individuals, unafraid of marginalizing themselves and having created communities of life.

So stress increases in organizations where individuals self-monitor in order to achieve objectives that are either changing under environmental pressure or increasingly restrictive.
So what could be the way out? Evangelicalism would consist of thinking that we could reestablish humanist values in organizations; but beyond the merits of this thought, it remains utopian because organizations are only what people make of them.

The solution lies with the individual who moves from the search for security to building their autonomy; this is not an easy evolution because the fears are great: failure, rejection, social exclusion and this approach certainly relies on faith and self-confidence. School and education certainly have a role to play in this approach so that this evolution is no longer endured but accepted for what it is, that is to say, inevitable.