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A third contradiction concerns the increase in virtual teams/collaborations, which can paradoxically be accompanied by the isolation of employees. This also reflects the opposition between “collective work” and “a work collective” (or teamwork) (Caroly and Clot 2004).

Collaborative work platforms and corporate digital social networks are thus being deployed, which ultimately aim more at prescribing collaborations between employees than at supporting existing cooperations. Without this bias, the company seeks to optimize collective intelligence, transversality and decompartmentalization between departments and teams, which are the new spearheads of matrix and agile organizations (Barville et al. 2018; see Chapter 2 in this book).

The aim of these systems is to order or even impose special forms of cooperation between employees in order to increase exchanges and collaborative work remotely (Crouzat and Bobillier Chaumon 2017; see Chapter 14 in this book). However, by seeking to organize collective work – at the expense of collective work – these technical environments create artificial collectives (Crapeau 2001) composed of individuals opportunely linked according to the needs of the organization and projects. However, this does not in any way promote the feeling of belonging to a professional community, to a work collective, or teamwork.

It should be remembered that this working group is the indispensable framework for regulating work constraints. The collective refers to a community of actions and thoughts, essential in the relationship between the individual and the work situation (Lhuilier 2006). It creates a sense of belonging and identification with a professional community. The role of the collective is therefore essential, because it is both a resource and a support (psychological, cognitive, social, professional) for individual action and a “social shock absorber” for organizational pressures. The absence or decline of these groups is partly responsible for the suffering of employees who are then unable to manage the various risks of the activity and to cope with the demands of the organization.

With these collaborative environments, if people feel like they are working virtually together, they do so by being more alone in front of their computers. This contributes to creating what Clot (2010) calls a collection of individuals, that is, an arrangement of interchangeable skills, linked together by fake relationships, and where individuals are exposed to isolation: they do not know who to rely on, who to turn to in case of a problem, who to open up to in case of a hard blow. This isolation can be compounded by a feeling of loneliness when one feels excluded or even banished from the working group to which one belongs. One feels alone among others in a way. Marc and Ladreyt (2019) speak of distressing loneliness to describe “a subjective experience suffering from delirium associated with a perceived lack of social support. The subject faces a solitary and constrained face-to-face encounter with himself/herself. This form of loneliness is pathogenic. It is an experience conducive to restlessness” (p. 262), which is accompanied by a withdrawal into oneself, a voluntary abandonment of all ties with others. The result is a double exclusion “of oneself among others and of others in oneself”.

This distressing loneliness can appear when the organization “corrupts” the use of certain technological artifacts by putting employees in competition with each other, which can be harmful to existing collectives. “Surviving together” then gives way to “every man for himself”. Indeed, as we have seen previously, certain tools seek to trace the activity and to report on the task performed using various numerical indicators. However, these indicators (often partial because they are based on the performance performed) prove to be inappropriate and insufficient to testify to the specificities and requirements of the real activity: namely, all the trials, errors, bewilderment, etc. necessary to complete the work. Management will, however, use these data to encourage emulation between employees. However, these individualized evaluations push individuals to judge, compare, confront and finally come head to head with each other between competitors (and no longer colleagues) at the risk of jeopardizing the relationships of mutual aid and trust, which are necessary for social cohesion in the activity. The other is then seen as an adversary that I must protect myself from and keep at a distance. This competition with others can also be doubled with competition with oneself when the individual seeks to maintain a level of excellence in the activity (de Gaulejeac and Hanique 2018), which in the end turns out to be very deleterious, even deadly.