Toward a Comprehensive Understanding of company performance: The impact of coaching and organizational learning

In the past, the notion of support was associated with creating a favorable environment for the development of new businesses. Today, the term is presented as an essential lever for business development through the provision of support, advice, and training. In OECD countries, most businesses disappear before their third year of existence. Those that survive, in most cases, only begin to be profitable after three years. This is because business creation remains easier than post-creation assistance. In this context, post-creation entrepreneurial support is presented as a means of developing the skills that are needed to ensure the growth of entrepreneurial projects. R. Cuzin and A. Fayolle elaborated on the forms of business coaching, the individual-centered strategy, which stipulates that coaching is more concerned with the psychological order. The other strategy focused on project set-up, financing, and feasibility studies. Finally, the strategy focused on the individual and the project, with the aim of verifying the fit between the individual and the project. In this article, we attempt to analyze individual- and project-centered coaching strategies and the impact of organizational learning on performance. To do this, we first defined the notion of support, the relationship between organizational learning and the development of corporate competencies, and The relationship between entrepreneurial support and performance. Despite its theoretical and methodological contributions, our research has some limitations. Indeed, the analysis was more interested in theories of resources and skills (Thornhill and Amit, 2003), without analyzing the importance of theories on the influence of the context and environmental variables on performance. To this end, we conducted a quantitative survey to confirm the theoretical findings and empirical results. The confirmatory study was carried out using a questionnaire sent to a sample of 339 companies.