Carence du leadership d’habilitation et comportements contreproductifs au travail : étude du rôle médiateur du ressentiment et du désengagement moral

Abstract

Since independences, anti-social behaviours have increased dramatically in several French-speaking African countries, with consequences for organisations and individuals. Faced with this situation for several decades in the public service, the Cameroonian government and partners’ organisations have put in place importants political and legal measures aimed at curbing this problem. These measures, based essentially on sensitisation and repression, have helped to sanction many actors of anti-organisationals’ behaviours, such as the embezzlement of public funds, desertions, corruption, etc., but the threat persists and leads to poor performance in the public service. Based on the organisational and psychosocial approach, this study aims to investigate the link between empowering leadership practices, resentment, moral disengagement and counterproductive work behaviours (CWB). This thesis draws its theoretical foundation from the frustration-aggression model (Dollard et al., 1939) and the stressor-emotion model (Spector & Fox, 2005). It methodological foundation is drawn from Baron and Kenny's (1986) mediation model. The hypothesis tested in this thesis is that, resentment and moral disengagement mediate the link between the deficiency of empowering leadership and counterproductive work behaviours. To contextualise the collection tools, a questionnaire composed by the Empowering Leadership Questionnaire (Arnold et al., 2000), the CWB scale (Spector, 2006), the moral disengagement scale (Bandura et., 1996) and the Job Affective Relative Work-scale (Van Katwyk et al., 2000), was administered to 158 Cameroonian civil servants. To test the study's hypotheses, a second survey was conducted with a sample of 253 civil servants. The participants were selected using a snowball sampling technique. The results revealed a very good fit of each structural model to the data with the significant indirect effects. This implies that resentment and moral disengagement are the psychoaffective processes through which the deficiency of empowering leadership fosters an increase counterproductive work behaviours. The results of this study are in line with the stressor-emotion model and indicate the need for public authorities to show example to the employees, to strengthen their autonomy and their access to information, and to increase good collaboration for the improvement of employees' work behaviour.