Évolution de la conception des objectifs organisationnels chez quelques gestionnaires québécois Evolution of Organizational Goals Concept Among French Canadian Managers

Résumé

Les gestionnaires francophones du Québec démontrent, semble-t-il, une évolution quant à leur conception des objectifs des organisations industrielles. Hier caractérisés par l'emphase mise sur les aspects humains du travail, ils sont aujourd'hui fortement centrés sur ses composantes économiques tout comme leurs confrères anglophones. Les deux groupes marquent aussi un éveil aux aspects sociaux des organisations.

Abstract

The studies realized with French-Canadian managers for over fifteen years now, seem to reveal a sort of move forward, slow but constant, toward the « American » business and organizations' spirit. Indeed, since Taylor, passing by the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilinguism, the francophone conception of organizational goals has been put on pressure and may be thought to have become similar to the anglophone conception.

This study, limited in its approach, tries to enlight three hypothesis based on previous researches :

— given the traditional order of organizational goals: i.e. economic, human and social;

— given many changes occured in the French-Canadian society: i.e. new educational system, great cultural move, new social and moral norms, and so on... ;

we hypothesize that :

1) the order of importance of the organizational goals will be the same for French and English managers: i.e. economic, human, and social, in this order;

2) English managers will emphasized the economic goals a little more than French managers ;

3) French managers will emphasized the human goals a little more than English managers.

The results confirm the first and the last hypothesis, and invalidate the second. In other words, the goals' order of importance is, as predicted, exactly the same for both groups. The French managers, furthermore, emphasize more the human goals than their English colleagues. But the very significant changes are at the economic level of organizational goals. The emphasis put on them, on the French side, is a « counter/ result » compared with all traditional data on this matter. This represents, perhaps, the most important sociological change which occured in the last decade concerning industrial thought and philosophy in the French-Canadian society.