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Dr. Stéphane Brutus

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Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Management
John Molson School of Business
Telephone: 514-848-2424 ext. 2912
E-mail: brutus@jmsb.concordia.ca

One of the most difficult tasks facing managers is evaluating others. Even more difficult? Being evaluated by others! The dynamic of individual feedback in organizations has been the main research interest of Dr. Stéphane Brutus ever since he completed his post-doctoral fellowship at a leading U.S. institute in leadership development, the Centre for Creative Leadership. Witnessing high-level managers struggle with simple feedback-giving simulations or seeing them lose their composure when receiving anonymous feedback from subordinates made it clear feedback dynamics represented a rich area of research.

Prior to that work, Dr. Brutus looked at the role of culture in feedback-giving. In a recently published article in the “International Journal of Human Resource Management”, he reports managers from collectivistic cultures were much less comfortable with evaluating others than those from individualist ones. Dr. Brutus has also collaborated with Bell Canada in scrutinizing their performance evaluation systems to find ways of enhancing how employees use those systems. A recent project with the successful videogame company Ubisoft, looked at linkages between the use of a performance appraisal system and game success.

In the past few years, Dr. Brutus leveraged his expertise on feedback to develop a centralized peer evaluation system now in use at John Molson School of Business. Last year, more than six thousand JMSB students evaluated each other at the end of group projects using a state-of-the art, web-based, evaluation process. The same system also allowed student to receive feedback from their peers. Research based on the use of this system showed it helped students became more comfortable with evaluating each other but also improved their performance in groups from one use to the next. This system is fast becoming a key pedagogical tool for the professional development of JMSB students.