Contribution to the understanding of the impact of entrepreneurial coaching experiences on the dynamics of experiential learning and the change of coaches' behaviors: case of the Réseau Entreprendre®.

Summary Faced with both collective and individual challenges for creators, support systems have progressively imposed themselves, constituting, since the 1980's, a general reality in Europe and more particularly in France. Among the practices of support for business creation, our interest in this research work is focused on the phenomenon of entrepreneurial accompaniment. Initially approached from a rather technical and collective point of view, entrepreneurial support has evolved into a practice of assistance to business creation based on an interpersonal relationship of influence between a business owner and an external actor and on a process of action based on multiple learning and the development of skills.If in the current state of research in entrepreneurship, the whole of the contributions of the accompaniment by the structure contributes to a better success of the accompanied carriers, we are more particularly interested, in our research work, in the other "hidden facet" of the relation of accompaniment which is the accompaniers and in this problematic of what these professional actors learn in their practices of accompaniment within the structures of accompaniment. We have, therefore, asked ourselves the question: To what extent do entrepreneurial coaching experiences affect the experiential learning outcomes and the individual and organizational behaviors of the coaches in Réseau Entreprendre ®? To answer this question, we mobilized the experiential learning theory (Kolb, 1985) as the reference model for our research. The meeting between the two basic concepts of our research, namely, entrepreneurial coaching and more specifically, the coach and Kolb's experiential learning theory (1984) allowed us to build our conceptual model by linking four main variables. These variables are associated with entrepreneurial coaching experiences, individual characteristics of coaches, experiential learning outcomes, and finally, changes in individual and organizational behaviors of coaches. Using a quantitative methodology, we administered a questionnaire to a sample of 205 business creation project coaches in 38 Réseau Entreprendre associations in France. The results of our quantitative analyses are obtained from SPSS and bring a better understanding of the learning cycle of the mentor in the support structures in general and in Réseau Entreprendre, in particular. The implications and contributions of our research work are theoretical, methodological and practical.