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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Uncertainty at Work How to Regulate it through Leadership in order to improve the Quality of Work Life?

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This thesis manuscript focuses on factors able to regulate the uncertainty of people at work. Due to the constant evolution of the organizational world, uncertainty is increasingly becoming a factor with which to combine in different contexts about work. This factor constitutes a risk for individuals due to its aversive nature. In this perspective we have been interested, on the one hand, about theories concerning the concept of uncertainty. This allowed us to better understand and delimit the concept. On the other hand, we looked for ways to regulate uncertainty through the concept of leadership. This led us to consider this regulation as being either potentially possible through a directive form of leadership or, on the contrary, through a participative form of leadership. After having supported these two avenues, we set ourselves three objectives: to identify which form of leadership is the most likely to regulate uncertainty; to verify whether this form of leadership can contribute to the psychological well-being of the individual; and finally, to uncover the mechanisms inherent to this form of leadership that allow us to understand the means by which this regulation takes place. These objectives guided a set of seven studies. The first three studies allowed us to answer our first two objectives. The results of these studies indicated that, overall, participative leadership contributed to the regulation of uncertainty, which in turn contributed to a set of positive factors linked to the psychological well-being of employees, or job seekers. Three other studies were launched, this time to address our third objective. Each study focused on one aspect of participative leadership that we identified as factors. However, although we obtained some interesting results, we did not consider this objective achieved. Therefore, we launched a final study to address the limitations of the previous ones that we identified. This last study allowed us to answer our third objective, and to make clearer the mechanisms related to the regulation of uncertainty. The theoretical, methodological and of course practical contributions are discussed in the discussion section. The conclusion that we can bring to this discussion, and to this research work more broadly, is that the regulation of uncertainty is not an individual process, but rather requires an effort put in place by organizations. In our view, an organization can be evaluated through three criteria of importance for the regulation of uncertainty: the individual's affiliation to a relational network, the sharing of information, and the projection into the future. These are the three avenues by which we believe this work could be pursued.