Le devoir de coopération durant l'exécution du contrat

Sous le régime du Code civil du Bas-Canada, le devoir d’exécuter le contrat de bonne foi était une condition implicite de tout contrat suivant l’article 1024 C.c.B.C. Le 1er janvier 1994, ce devoir a toutefois été codifié à l’article 1375 du Code civil du Québec. Parallèlement à ce changement, le contrat a subi plusieurs remises en question, principalement en raison des critiques émises contre la théorie de l’autonomie de la volonté. En réponse à ces critiques, la doctrine a proposé deux théories qui supposent une importante coopération entre les contractants durant l’exécution du contrat, à savoir le solidarisme contractuel et le contrat relationnel. La notion de bonne foi a aussi évolué récemment, passant d’une obligation de loyauté, consistant généralement en une abstention ou en un devoir de ne pas nuire à autrui, à une obligation plus active d’agir ou de faciliter l’exécution du contrat, appelée devoir de coopération. Ce devoir a donné lieu à plusieurs applications, dont celles de renseignement et de conseil. Ce mémoire étudie la portée et les limites du devoir de coopération. Il en ressort que le contenu et l’intensité de ce devoir varient en fonction de critères tenant aux parties et au contrat. Une étude plus particulière des contrats de vente, d’entreprise et de franchise ainsi que des contrats conclus dans le domaine informatique indique que le devoir de coopération est plus exigeant lorsque le contrat s’apparente au contrat de type relationnel plutôt qu’au contrat transactionnel. Le créancier peut, entre autres choses, être obligé d’« aider » son débiteur défaillant et même de renégocier le contrat devenu déséquilibré en cours d’exécution, bien que cette dernière question demeure controversée. Le devoir de coopération n’est cependant pas illimité parce qu’il s’agit d’une obligation de moyens et non de résultat. Il est également limité, voire inexistant, lorsque le débiteur de cette obligation est tenu à d’autres obligations comme un devoir de réserve ou de non-ingérence, lorsque le cocontractant est de mauvaise foi ou qu’une partie résilie unilatéralement le contrat ou décide de ne pas le renouveler.

The development and validation of a psychological contract of safety scale

Introduction
This paper builds on previous research by the author and describes the development and validation of a new measure of the psychological contract of safety. The psychological contract of safety is defined as the beliefs of individuals about reciprocal safety obligations inferred from implicit and explicit promises.

Method
A psychological contract is established when an individual believes that perceived employer and employee safety obligations are contingent on each other. A pilot test of the measure is first undertaken with participants from three different occupations: nurses, construction workers, and meat processing workers (N = 99). Item analysis is used to refine the measure and provide initial validation of the scale. A larger validation study is then conducted with a participant sample of health care workers (N = 424) to further refine the measure and to determine the psychometric properties of the scale.

Results
Item and correlational analyses produced the final employer and employee obligations scales, consisting of 21 and 17 items, respectively. Factor analyses identified two underlying dimensions in each scale comparable to that previously established in the organizational literature. These transactional and relational-type obligations provided construct validity of the scale. Internal consistency ratings using Cronbach's alpha found the components of the psychological contract of safety measure to be reliable.

Impact on Industry
The refined and validated psychological contract of safety measure will allow investigation of the positive and negative outcomes associated with fulfilment and breach of the psychological contract of safety in future research.

A psychological contract perspective to the link between non-profit organizations' management practices and volunteer sustainability

This study applies the concept of the psychological contract to the relationship between management practices and volunteers. Formalization of the voluntary sector is impacting on volunteers’ experiences and may breach the psychological contract from the volunteers’ perspective. This mixed method study interviewed 67 volunteers and volunteer coordinators/administrators, and collected mail survey information from 152 volunteer organizations. The transactional management practices of keeping formal records and not paying volunteers out of pocket expenses are negatively associated with volunteer recruitment and retention. Alternatively, publicly recognizing volunteers through a volunteer newsletter supports volunteers’ relational expectations and is positively linked to adequate volunteer numbers. Our findings have important implications for the human resource development practices of non-profit organizations in dealing with their volunteers: they suggest that the relational expectations of volunteers are an important aspect of the psychological contract, which could be used by organizations as a framework for developing management practices that fit the volunteer ethos of trust and networks.

Exploring the dimensions and transactional outcomes of incomplete business contracts

With an increased emphasis on outsourcing and shortening business cycles, contracts between firms have become more important. Carefully written contracts contribute to the efficiency and longevity of inter-firm relationships as they may constrain opportunism and are often a less costly governance mechanism than maintaining complex social relationships (Larson 1992). This exploratory examination adds to our understanding of how incomplete contracts affect interorganizational exchange. First, we consider the multiple dimensions of contract constraints (safeguards). We also investigate the extent that constraints affect decisions to enforce the relationship by delaying payments, and whether the decision is efficient. Finally, we examine the extent the constraints are effective (and ineffective) at reducing transaction problems associated with enforcement. Based on 971 observations of transactions using explicit, written terms and other secondary data in the context of IT transaction in The Netherlands we test our research propositions.

Contract specificity and its performance outcomes

Governance theories, such as transaction cost economics, argue that systematic deviations from an attribute–governance alignment should influence performance. This article investigates the performance implications of contract specificity for the procurement of information technology products. The authors argue that parties choose a level of contract specificity that economizes on both the ex ante contracting costs and the ex post transaction costs and that deviations between the observed and the predicted levels of contract specificity are an important determinant of these transaction costs. The authors test the hypotheses using a comprehensive archival data set of information technology transactions and employ a two-step estimation procedure. First, they estimate the “predicted” level of contract specificity, which accounts for key transactional attributes. Second, they study the consequences of deviating from this predicted level of contractual specificity. The results provide the first explicit demonstration of the trade-off between ex ante contracting costs and ex post transaction problems and suggest that parties need to economize jointly on these costs when choosing the governance form.

A multi-level investigation of psychological contract breach and organizational identification through the lens of perceived organizational membership:testing a moderated-mediated model

Drawing on the perceived organizational membership theoretical framework and the social identity view of dissonance theory, I examined in this study the dynamics of the relationship between psychological contract breach and organizational identification. I included group-level transformational and transactional leadership as well as procedural justice in the hypothesized model as key antecedents for organizational membership processes. I further explored the mediating role of psychological contract breach in the relationship between leadership, procedural justice climate, and organizational identification and proposed separateness–connectedness self-schema as an important moderator of the above mediated relationship. Hierarchical linear modeling results from a sample of 864 employees from 162 work units in 10 Greek organizations indicated that employees' perception of psychological contract breach negatively affected their organizational identification. I also found psychological contract breach to mediate the impact of transformational and transactional leadership on organizational identification. Results further provided support for moderated mediation and showed that the indirect effects of transformational and transactional leadership on identification through psychological contract breach were stronger for employees with a low connectedness self-schema.

Success factors in an alliancing contract : a case study in Australia

Many studies have been carried out in relation to construction procurement methods. Evidence shows that there needs to be a change of culture and attitude in the construction industry, moving away from traditional adversarial relationship into cooperative and collaborative relationship. At the same time there is also an increasing concern and discussion on alternative procurement methods, drifting away from traditional procurement systems. Relational contracting approaches have become more popular in recent years, and have appeared in common forms such as partnering, alliancing and relationship management contracts. This paper reports the findings of a survey undertaken with a private organisation based on an alliance project during its design stage, identifying the critical factors that influence the success of the alliance project. Legal aspects focusing on dispute resolution in alliancing are also highlighted.

Transforming the psychological contract through a continuous innovation methodology

This paper introduces the Corporate Culture Change Cycle: a continuous innovation methodology for transforming the psychological contract in an organisational context. The eight step process is based on the action learning model. The purpose of this methodology is to benchmark the psychological contract against eight changing values of the employment relationship as a basis for facilitating a process of aligning the changing needs of employer and employee. Both the Corporate Culture Change Cycle and the New Employment Relationship Model have been validated in several organisational settings and subsequently refined. This continuous innovation methodology addresses gaps in the psychological contract, change management and continuous innovation research literatures. The approach therefore should be of interest to researchers in these fields of study and from a practical perspective for managers wishing to transform their workplace cultures.

Great adaptations : China's creative clusters and the new social contract

The transformation of China's urban landscape has witnessed a boom in cultural adaptation, namely the adaptation of a Western idea, the creative cluster. This chapter examines the formatting of hundreds of creative clusters-art centres, animation bases, cultural zones, and incubators. The cluster has important implications for how we understand China going forward into the second decade of the 21st century. The cluster phenomenon has resulted in to a substantive remaking of the social contract, between officials, entrepreneurs, local residents, academics-and most significantly cultural producers. However, these processes of adaption are mostly driven by real estate developers working in partnership with local government officials. Cut and paste design is the fast road to completion. In this sense, the description 'creative' may well be redundant.

Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of web queries

In this paper, we define and present a comprehensive classification of user intent for Web searching. The classification consists of three hierarchical levels of informational, navigational, and transactional intent. After deriving attributes of each, we then developed a software application that automatically classified queries using a Web search engine log of over a million and a half queries submitted by several hundred thousand users. Our findings show that more than 80% of Web queries are informational in nature, with about 10% each being navigational and transactional. In order to validate the accuracy of our algorithm, we manually coded 400 queries and compared the results from this manual classification to the results determined by the automated method. This comparison showed that the automatic classification has an accuracy of 74%. Of the remaining 25% of the queries, the user intent is vague or multi-faceted, pointing to the need for probabilistic classification. We discuss how search engines can use knowledge of user intent to provide more targeted and relevant results in Web searching.