The most recent large-scale study shows that religion at work has matured and become commonplace (Institut Montaigne, OFRE, 2019). Seventy percent of individuals claim to encounter it at least occasionally, notably through requests for adjustments to working hours, prayers during breaks, or the wearing of visible religious signs.
We consider religion in the monotheistic sense as intrinsically linked to the question of salvation and thus of access to the afterworld, conditional on the “good” behavior of the faithful. It is therefore normative, referring to a dogma, traditions, and institutions, and proposes a certain vision of transcendence. Religious fact (Debray, 2002) in the work context can be defined as the set of behaviors that arise from the interpretation of the faithful (who must have self-defined as such) of the religious doctrine to which they refer and that occur in a professional context (Gaillard and Jolivet, 2019). To address these behaviors, organizations seek a point of balance through regulation to define their posture (i.e. position) on the matter (Galindo and Zannad, 2014). These positions can sometimes be perceived as unfair or exclusionary by employees (Benaïssa, 2019; Gaillard, 2019).
This work allows us to understand how the management of religious behaviors perceived as exclusionary can contribute to the development of activities that reconcile religiosity and professionalism. In the first section, we propose a research state of the art on the impact of religious fact in organizations and the perceived inclusion of religious behaviors…