Caroline Aubé Saluted by the Emerald Literati Network for a Scientific Paper

Professor Caroline Aubé and her colleague Vincent Rousseau, of the School of Industrial Relations at the Université de Montréal, received a prestigious recognition for a scientific paper at the 2017 Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. Their paper, “Yes, we complain … so what?” published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology, earned them the Highly Commended Paper Award.

Emerald Publishing owns a large number of scientific journals in the management field, and presents annual awards on the basis of recommendations by the editorial committees of each of the group’s periodicals.

The winning paper describes how complaining about everything, particularly to one’s fellow team members, can harm work team performance. “Some people wrongly feel that complaining is healthy and has little negative impact [on their performance at work],” explains Caroline Aubé. But the results of her study show that the habit of complaining about everything can have particularly negative consequences on team effectiveness, especially when task interdependence is high. Complaining appears to reduce the meaningfulness of work, and thereby detract from performance and innovation in work processes.

Caroline Aubé specializes in organizational behaviour. She is a Full Professor in the Department of Management at HEC Montréal and holds a Professorship in Work Team Management. She is also a researcher with the Groupe de recherche sur la collaboration en commandement et contrôle (GR3C), and an associate researcher with the Tech3Lab. The paper may be consulted free of charge until June 20, 2018, by visiting the web page of Emerald Insight.