mediation activity of first-line managers in an airline company, during their production planning task: health at the heart of management issues

This research takes place in an airline company seeking to improve its prevention measures in order to cope with the increase in medical restrictions among ground staff. We took as our starting point the actual practices of the first-line managers in order to improve the prevention measures, using the ergonomic approach to the work activity. The notion of mediation is used here because it is effective in accounting for a work activity caught up in antagonisms that are in tension with one another and potentially conflicting (health and production goals; short and long-term; management and agents). The results show the complexity of this multifaceted mediation activity deployed within the framework of a production planning task (constraints, decision-making processes and arbitrations, multiple criteria), which appears crucial for the sustainable and comprehensive prevention of health-related risks for subordinate agents. This activity is based on individual and collective experience (health indicators constructed in a given situation and discussed during the planning task). It depends on the intensity of the first-line managers' work (number of events to be managed and large number of criteria to be taken into account in the decision-making processes) and on their room for maneuver (composition of the workforce, representation of health issues, decision-making power). This set of results shows that health is not a task ancillary to the activity of first-line managers but an object under permanent construction and located at the heart of management issues, at the service of performance. In this respect, the informal prevention practices deployed by first-line managers should be made visible and linked to the prevention practices of occupational health services.