Identifier, mesurer et évaluer l’efficacité des techniques de rétroaction dans un contexte d’évaluation de potentiel

With the massive retirement of baby boomers, the Conference Board of Canada (2014) points to the urgent need for companies to ensure the proper selection and development of candidates to fill upcoming openings. To this end, companies are referring more and more candidates to specialized firms in potential assessment, as they have the mandate to evaluate and accelerate their development (Pease, 2010).  The meta-analysis by Morris, Daisley, Wheeler and Boyer (2015) also reveals that these potential assessments predict the subsequent success of the job candidate. This is why the feedback session that usually takes place after the potential assessment is so important; it allows the candidate and the consultant to meet to discuss the professional skills that the candidate can develop based on the results of this potential assessment (Moses, 2011). The objective of this thesis is to understand how consultants can foster candidates' interest in taking actions that allow them to develop professionally after feedback. More specifically, this thesis focuses on the feedback techniques used by consultants in a potential assessment context. The first objective is to identify for the first time all the feedback techniques used in a potential assessment context. The second and third objectives will be to develop a classification of these techniques and to measure it in order to verify that this classification captures what is happening in practice. Finally, the final objective will be to verify the effectiveness of these techniques, by assessing the extent to which they predict certain reactions in the candidate. The first article was written with the intention of meeting the three first objectives of the thesis. The project was therefore carried out in three phases.  First, a literature review on intervention techniques that promote change in a professional or therapeutic context was conducted. This made possible the identification of such techniques and a proposed classification. Then, potential assessment consultants reviewed the list of techniques identified to ensure that they covered their whole practice when providing feedback. Finally, a questionnaire was developed to measure the techniques used by the consultants during the feedback and to verify the proposed classification. An exploratory factor analysis revealed the existence of six categories of feedback techniques, slightly different from those initially anticipated. These techniques are: interventions aimed to explain the evaluation results, interventions focusing on positive emotions, interventions focusing on relationships, interventions focusing on gaps, interventions focusing on the development plan and interventions focusing on concrete examples. The article concludes by proposing a final definition of each category of feedback techniques and presenting the items of the measurement instrument. The second article attempts to address the fourth objective by examining the relationship between feedback techniques and the candidate's different reactions. To this end, the feedback appropriation model of Boudrias, Bernaud and Plunier (2014) was used, stating that the acceptance of the feedback message, the awareness gained and the intention to develop professionally are good predictors of the candidate's subsequent actions. The results of this study show that interventions designed to bring positive emotions to the candidate and those designed to identify future development avenues are the most promising techniques for the candidate to react well to the feedback. The thesis ends with a discussion of its contribution, its methodological limitations and their impacts, on future research avenues, and then opens a new perspective by addressing the literature on the transfer of learning.

Keyphrases: potential assessment, feedback appropriation, skill development, change, feedback techniques