Effet Gavroche et relations hyperconflictuelles de travail

The University of Liege Department of social Psychology for Groups and Organisations has been leading since 1999 an elaborate action research program on intense conflict situations in which people feel they are subjected to aggressions or bullying.
This action research aims on the one hand to develop a better understanding of these issues and to find new directions for action. It includes interventions in organisations AND clinical work with people who felt they were subjected to bullying.

In the course of our different interventions ( clinical as well as in organisations), we often felt that the concept of bullying was far too narrow, too restrictive to enable us to evoke all the situations we had to deal with even if people used this very word most of the time to refer to their situation and even if these situations included the usually accepted characteristics : hostile behaviour and prejudicial consequences for the persons aimed at ( Quine 1995).

We have accordingly extracted from these experiments a few theoretical questions which inspire this article

* Is this notion " bullying" appropriate for all the conflicts in which violent ways of behaving are perpetrated and in which people are subjected to important damages?
* How should we consider situations in which the interfering parties are both violent and in which both parties suffer from it?
* Can we try to define the concept of " hyper-conflict" to depict situations characterised by intense conflicts as far as ways of behaving, cognition as well as emotions are concerned.
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* On the other hand, from an empirical point of view, two main explaining patterns seem to exist now in the field of victimisation at work ( Einarsen 1999). The first one focuses on the personality aspects of the people aimed at in these conflicts, the second deals with the part played by psychosocial factors.
* On the strength of a bet according to which it might be fertile to insert results coming from meetings with victims giving pieces of information more related to the first pattern as well as from interventions in organisations ( where we expect the results to lean more on the side of the second pattern), we asked the following questions as research material:
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* Can we identify recurring psychological and/or organisational patterns in these situations of intense conflicts?
* Can we describe the dynamics of these patterns?
* How can we describe the way the organisational and individual dimensions get interwoven to build up these dynamics without tracing the explanation to one dimension or to the other?

This article deals more particularly with the standardisation of a conflictual pattern we encountered several times and which we named the Gavroche effect. This Gavroche effect concentrates around a psychosocial process of polarising- stigmatising that we will describe hereafter but before that we will sketch the aforementioned theoretical issues.