Courage at work: putting the ethical and ontological approaches to the concept in psychology into perspective

Considered a virtue since antiquity, courage stands up to adversity. Many scientific disciplines recognize it as a powerful resource in today’s tense world of work. In psychology, much has been written about courage at work, but to our knowledge, no such synthesis has yet been proposed. The syntheses carried out to date either present an interdisciplinary vision or focus on a field other than psychology. We propose a non-systematic review of the literature on the subject in the psychological sciences, which questions the construct of courage at work. We refer to 27 publications, both in French and English which are reputed to be of high quality. Text selection is based on the PRISMA method (Page et al., 2021).

In the first part of our paper, we present an overview of the research in psychology on courage at work, divided according to their approach to the subject; ethical or ontological. This overview gives rise to four main questions, which we address in the second part of our paper. They are as follows: (a) developing the concept of courage at work, (b) heterogeneity of the theoretical underpinnings of the selected studies, (c) heterogeneous observation perspectives, (d) the question of responsibility to act within work organizations in relation to courage at work. Towards the end of the article, we also suggest how to study manifestations of courage that are specific to workplaces. In our view, we need to adopt an anthropological perspective on work and the ontological path of courage. Acts of courage at work are to be sought out by workers, in their daily work lives and from the point of view of their subjective experience. Finally, we propose some ideas for developing courage in the workplace. It should be stressed that the question of developing courage at work must never be dissociated from the question of improving working conditions, to avoid any attempt to make workers responsible for organizational constraints or malfunctions.