HOW TO MEASURE SOFT SKILLS? THE CONTRIBUTION OF BANDURA'S SOCIAL AGENCY THEORY

Managers say that individual behaviour and the quality of social interactions between members of the organisation are becoming increasingly important during recruitment or annual evaluation interviews.

In doing so, they confirm that they are increasingly sensitive to what the academic community calls"organizational behaviours".
For their part, schools and universities, in addition to the teaching given in the form of conferences or courses - and to take account of what is learned above all through experience - add to their teaching system situations for their students, learning intended to bring them that extra knowledge of others and themselves, know-how and know-how that companies say they need.

From a theoretical point of view, the history of organizational behaviour has been the subject of work by researchers in psychology and later in management sciences. Among the theoretical contributions available on this subject, Albert Bandura's sociocognitive theory is particularly interesting. It is a theoretical proposition of"human functioning" considered as the product of the dynamic interaction of personal, behavioural and environmental factors. Bandura describes the phenomenon of"interactive agentivity" as"the human capacity to exert a thoughtful and personally oriented influence on one's own functioning and on the environment" (Bandura, 2001). However, to date, this theoretical contribution has never been the subject of operationalization work. The present research proposes to carry out such a work through two consubstantial concepts with the structuring capacities of Bandura's theory and which have, separately, been the subject of numerous empirical researches: These are, on the one hand, the concept of"core self-assessment (CSE)" (Judge et al, 1997) and, on the other hand, the concept of"organizational citizenship behaviours (OCB)" (Organ, 1988). By jointly mobilizing CSE and OCB measures for the same individual, we make it possible to calculate for a person and - by aggregation - for a given group, a position characteristic of the"social agency" of the individual or population studied. Carried out within a school or university - especially those whose mission is to train their students in management - this approach offers the interesting capacity of a potentially fertile diagnosis to differentiate teaching and learning in order to build or consolidate as much as possible these"agentique" capacities within their various promotions.

The research proposed to be presented at the congress sets out the theoretical underpinnings and operationalization mentioned above. It proposes to present an application of this diagnosis and to offer a taxonomy of the"agentique profiles" revealed on the basis of an empirical study carried out on a population of students of a French School of Management. This typology obviously cannot be considered as a stigmatization of this or that individual profile. On the contrary, it offers training structures - mainly initial - the potential interest of improving students' capacities through teaching and learning that takes into account each student's strengths and weaknesses with regard to the organisational behaviour desired by the organisations in which the said students will subsequently be called upon to work.