Transformation de l'activité d'encadrement de proximité : que fait le pilotage par la performance à la 'proximité' des cadres ? : Le cas d'une grande administration publique

摘要

Since the 2000s, France set up important policies of State reforms. The aim of these reforms is to modernize the French State management by refocusing this one on its missions' priority as to improve the service provided to the user and to reduce the public spending. These reforms have repercussions on all the actors, in particular on the first-line managers. Between their hierarchy which sets goals of performance and their teams which “do” the work, these first-line managers translate day-to-day the objectives into concrete missions.In order to understand this balanced posture and its consequences on the activity and on the health of managers, this thesis is interested in the activity of the Head office of the Public finances' first-line managers. This administration was created in 2008 and joins in the line of New Public Management. This kind of managers is from the two former sectors which existed before the merger: the respective cultures differ in the approach of performance-based management and the relation to the agents. In an administration in permanent change, the first-line managers are pulled by contradictory orders. This kind of orders questions constantly the positioning towards the hierarchy and supervised team, towards objectives of performance and living conditions at work, towards logics of technical skill and managerial logics. Although the multidisciplinary literature – sciences of management, sociology, psychology – is extensive in particular on the role and the positioning of the first-line managers, the contents of their work are few approached. In ergonomics, some researches on the work of the first-line managers are rather interested in the analysis of working situations. For our part, we suggest analyzing this activity under the prism of the careers (Gaudart & Ledoux, 2013). These careers represent a succession of jobs or functions and a working course with an increase of real-life time (Molinié, Gaudart & Pueyo, 2012) which points at the experience's roles. Our two objectives are to understand how the work transformations impact on the first-line managers' activity and how the experience can be a resource to realize this activity, in particular to regulate the couple closeness / distances by these managers.Our strategy of research combines five methods: the analysis of an existing “space of dialogue” plan and its contents, interviews of the careers' reconstruction, observations of the 14 managers' activity, auto-confrontations from the tracks of the activity, and the organization of reflexive workshops.