The broad purpose of this dissertation is to enhance the quality of managerial decisions through evidence-based management. Specifically, it raises three key questions: What is evidence? What are the attributes of knowledge that can facilitate informed decision making? How can such knowledge be generated? To answer these questions this thesis proposes a theory of evidence, suggesting that the strength of evidence is contingent upon its methodological fit, contextuality, transparency, replicability, and consensus. A model of evidence-based decision making is offered that explores how managers’ judgment, experience, and personal values along with the values of other stakeholders, contextual factors, and ethical constraints, may affect the decision process. Moreover, this thesis argues that in order to foster evidence-based management practice we need knowledge that is rigorous, relevant and actionable. To this end, a theory of actionability is proposed, and an empirical study is conducted to determine the attributes of actionable management knowledge. Based on the study, an actionability index is suggested. Evidence that is actionable requires sustainable collaborative effort to produce, curate and communicate. To accomplish that a theory of evidence-based collaboration is proposed. This theory conceives the collaboration as an independent organization that oversees the process of bringing rigour, relevance, and actionability together, and provides an interactive platform for producers, arbiters and users of management knowledge to communicate and collaborate. A template, guided by the theory of collaboration, is designed to produce systematic reviews that are useful for management practice. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Les PME sont en France la cible de nombreuses sollicitations depuis plus de trente ans. Les opérations de conseil se sont particulièrement intensifiées auprès de ces petites entreprises afin de les rendre plus performantes. Sous l‟impulsion des pouvoirs publics, des programmes d‟accompagnement spécifiques leur sont proposés au cours de ces dernières décennies. Notamment, le modèle de la gestion des compétences qui est présenté, à la fin des années quatre-Vingt-Dix, comme la voie à suivre pour faire face aux enjeux de la mondialisation et de la compétitivité. La diffusion de ces nouvelles normes organisationnelles s‟effectue par le biais d‟une nébuleuse d‟acteurs. Parmi ces formes de conseil, quel rôle jouent les organisations intermédiaires, à la fois prescriptrices et productrices de dispositifs institutionnalisés d‟incitation à la GRH ? Ces dispositifs sont-Ils actionnables ? Quels impacts ont ces approches dans les entreprises et plus particulièrement dans les plus petites d‟entre elles ? Ces opérations de conseil modifient-Elles les pratiques des dirigeants de PME ? Les prescriptions des consultants jouent-Elles un rôle identique, ou sont-Elles appropriées, incorporées de façon spécifique par les dirigeants, selon une diversité de trajectoires d‟appropriation liée à la pluralité des configurations de petites entreprises ? / For over thirty years, a great number of appeals have been made to SMEs. Consultancy operations have significantly intensified with regard to these companies, in order to increase their performance. Under the influence of public governance, specific recommendations and support programmes have been proposed to SMEs over the past few decades. Among these, the skills management model, which was presented at the end of the 1990s as the best path to take in order to respond to the challenges companies now face with regard to globalisation and competitiveness. The dissemination of these new organizational norms occurs through a nebula of actors. With regard to these recommendations, what is the role of intermediary organisations, which simultaneously produce and prescribe institutionalized incentive plans for Human Resources Management? Can these plans be seen as actionable? What are the impacts of these approaches on firms, and especially on the smallest firms? Do these consultancy operations modify the practices of the directors of SMEs? Do the prescriptions of consultants always play the same role, or are they incorporated and appropriated differently by company directors, in accordance with a diversity of modes of appropriation adapted to the plurality of organizational structures present in small companies?

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