Daniel
Mendes Pires Haack
Federal
Institute of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
E-mail: danihaack@gmail.com
Stella
Regina Reis da Costa
Federal
Fluminense University (UFF), Brazil
E-mail:
stellare@ig.com.br
Augusto
da Cunha Reis
Federal
Fluminense University (UFF), Brazil
E-mail:
professor.augusto.reis@gmail.com
Submission: 2/4/2019
Revision: 5/17/2019
Accept: 10/28/2019
ABSTRACT
Given the current scenario, where the citizen's level of demand for public services is gradually high, it is impossible to maintain the old inefficient practices in Public Administration. Given this situation, it is necessary to reformulate the methods to improve the final product, moving the current processes to an administration of a more managerial nature, based not only on efficiency, but also on the efficiency of the product returned to society. In this sense, it is conceived that such a reformulation should include Human Resources Management, also directing it to a strategic management model, through which people and, consequently, their motivation, take on a central role for the Institutions, in order to strengthen the degree of commitment between employee and Organization. As an objective, this work aimed at the construction of a proposal of action to assist a Federal Education Institution of Rio de Janeiro in the retention of its servers. In order to do so, the main factors capable of adversely affecting the process of establishment of organizational commitment, as well as the application of a questionnaire to 95 employees of the institution, were identified through bibliographic and documentary exploratory research, in order to identify the degree of relevance of these factors, and the proposition of specific actions, such as the creation of a bank of hours for the servers, in order to mitigate or even reverse the evasion of talent in the Institution.
Keywords: Organizational Commitment; Talents
Evasion; People´s Strategic Management; Organizational Climate; People´s
Motivation.
1.
INTRODUCTION
1.1.
INITIAL
CONSIDERATIONS
The diverse transformations, whether economic or social, linked to the advent of globalization have been reshaping the man vs. work relationship, where, every day, the requirement to align high productivity with low cost of production intensifies in order to achieve a greater competitiveness in the face of the demanding capitalist market (SILVA et al., 2009).
Cruz, Queiroz and Lima (2014) state that the commitment of people is increasingly being valued by organizations, making the committed employee the target of corporate investment. And, in turn, motivation is the path to commitment, being of utmost importance for progress in the institution's return (NETO; MARQUES; PAIVA, 2017).
Another existing correlation, according to Almeida and Tacconi (2015), is between job satisfaction and employee motivation. According to the author, it is not possible to motivate someone, because motivation is intrinsic. In that way, satisfaction would function as a propellant in the self-motivation process.
It is of great value, in this regard, to deepen the studies related to the influence of organizational commitment on institutions, and we find ourselves in a propitious moment for the accomplishment of this task, as Cruz, Queiroz and Lima (2014) advocate, current human resources management is at a time where it is possible to realize the importance of employee appreciation and encouragement so that they can perform their tasks in the best possible way.
1.2.
OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study was the construction of a proposal of action to assist a Federal Education Institution to retain its servers.
1.3.
JUSTIFICATION
This study is justified, because employees with low levels of work satisfaction, motivation and organizational commitment tend to have high turnover intentions, bringing numerous losses to the public administration with this phenomenon, such as a scenario permeated by inefficiency and ineffectiveness.
2.
LITERATURE REVIEW
In the current context, according to Cruz et al. (2014), much more is required of the employees than just the technical knowledge, with intellectual capacity emerging as the most desired attribute by the organizations. However, in order for talents to be developed, people must, first and foremost, be encouraged in order to commit themselves to the objectives of the institution (FLAUZINO; BORGES-ANDRADE, 2008).
It is conceived that highly committed employees have greater satisfaction in carrying out their work activities, wish to contribute to the success of the organization and do not plan to disconnect from their Institutions. Considering this, it's worth noting the importance of not underestimating the role of the employees' organizational commitment to the good organizational performance of the institutions (ALLEN; MEYER, 1996; MEYER; HERSCOVITCH, 2001; MEYER et al., 2002; MEYER et al., 2004).
On the other hand, according to Flauzino and Borges-Andrade (2008), the deficiency in the employee's commitment to the organization in which they work has the inverse role: it is capable of negatively affecting the employees’ performance and making companies less competitive.
Through a study carried out in the departments and technical assistance of the School of Economics and Administration of USP by Campos et al. (2009), the authors achieved results that conclude that commitment has real effectiveness and efficiency in the accomplishment of the work, also revealing a predominance of the affective side - the one that most contributes to a positive result - before the other forms of commitment.
However, the need to mitigate costs is a phenomenon to be considered, but the deterioration of loyalty affects the organizational commitment, which can generate even greater costs, such as an increase in the turnover rate (FLAUZINO and BORGES-ANDRADE, 2008). Mohamed, Taylor and Hassan (2006) reiterate that for organizational commitment to be fortified it is necessary for the employee to have the feeling that he is being cared for and that he is respected and important for the institution.
Cruz, Queiroz and Lima (2014) identified, in their research at a public university, situations that reduce job satisfaction, hurt employee motivation, and negatively affect organizational commitment in the public sphere:
·
The impossibility of changing positions and the difficulty
in reaching positions that show professional ascendancy,
causing frustration to the server regarding
new personal and career possibilities;
·
Low gratified functions
before the responsibility of their attributions, causing little interest for the acceptance and feeling of discredit from
the activity to be performed;
·
Level of training beyond
what is required
for the job, by a good portion
of the employees,
where many hold middle-level positions, when they have a graduate
degree and, in not so rare
cases, even full post-graduate degrees and/or stricto sensu;
·
The dissatisfaction with their salaries, judging it
inferior to what they should receive
due to their
high education and the level of
responsibility of their activities;
·
The maximum capacity of servers in sectors where they perform
activities in which they are not interested
or lack the
ability to exercise, evidenced by the speech of
the work week being just
another routine to be fulfilled,
the desire to retire immediately after meeting the minimum requirements, the intention to
leave the institution at some point in their lives.
Complementing the adversities mentioned above, it is important to highlight the relevance of the work environment and the interpersonal relationship as tools to raise the level of performance of public servants, since such employees perceive stability after approval in their probationary stages and could hardly come to be disconnected from the public service (CAMPOS et al., 2009).
In a survey carried out with employees of an Angolan diamond mining company, the correlations between job satisfaction, affective commitment and the intention of turnover were investigated. As a result, the researchers obtained that the satisfaction of the employees from this organization has, as its main causes, the amount of promotions; the competence of their leadership and the way they are treated by it.
Another perceived factor is that when job satisfaction and affective commitment are raised, the intention to leave the institution where one works is reduced (FRANCISCO; CLARO, 2014). In light of this, it should be concluded that a valid method to attack the intention of the public servants' turnover is to foster the reasons for job satisfaction and affective commitment.
3. METHODOLOGY
3.1.
APPLIED
METHODOLOGY
It has been used in this work the bibliographic and documentary research with an exploratory character. Being the case study the adopted method and, in turn, the unstructured observation and the qualitative analysis were the tools of data collection used in the research.
3.2.
DESCRIPTION
OF THE RESEARCHED INSTITUTION
The researched institution currently possesses around 13 thousand students in its classrooms, was and is responsible for the formation of thousands of students over the years, having in its table of graduates presidents of the republic, musicians, composers, poets, doctors, lawyers, professors, historians, among others, and its staff contains approximately 969 technical-administrative servers and 1,355 teachers.
3.3.
UNIVERSE AND
SAMPLE
The universe of this study is restricted to the totality of the servers filled in the Rectory and Pro-Rectorates of the institution, making up, in all, about 247 employees. Whilst the sample was constituted by 95 servers, since the used approach was by accessibility.
The choice to perform this work in the sectors in question is due to the fact that such instances function as the operational and strategic center of the Organ, being the units that have the largest number of servers in the same area, besides having several servers from other campi and, consequently, presenting itself as a fruitful field of diversity.
For this study, a likert-type questionnaire was used, with a gradation from 1 to 5, where 1 = irrelevant; 2 = slightly relevant; 3 = I don't know; 4 = relevant; 5 = very relevant, in order to assess the degree of relevance of the ten main factors that could negatively affect the process of establishing the organizational commitment of professionals according to the literature, being these: impossibility of change of position and difficulty in reaching positions that show professional ascendancy; low financial return of gratified functions in light of the responsibility of their attributions; having a higher level of education and holding a medium or fundamental level position; low remuneration value of the position being performed; maximum capacity in sectors where they carry out uninteresting activities or for which they do not have aptitude; lack of autonomy in work-related activities; lack of flexibility in working hours; bad relationship with co-workers; dissatisfaction with leaders and management; lack of professional recognition.
Of these, only eight factors were considered relevant to the process of attrition in work satisfaction, the reduction of motivation and the loss of organizational commitment, by the employees of the institution surveyed, excluding "impossibility of changing positions and difficulty in reaching positions that show professional ascendancy" and "having a higher education level and holding a medium or fundamental level position."
Although considered significant, however, the factors "low financial return of gratified functions in light of the responsibility of their attributions" and "low remuneration value of the position being performed" were rejected due to the lack of autonomy of the Federal Institutions of Education in deciding issues related to wage policies, as well as foreseen by the Brazilian Federal Constitution determining that the remuneration of the public servant and his allowances may only be established or altered by means of a specific law (BRAZIL, 1988).
In light of this, proposals for action have been presented to each of the six main factors detrimental to the establishment of organizational commitment with the intention of helping to reduce the evasion of the institution's servers.
4. ANALYSIS OF RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Based on the literature review of this article: that low job satisfaction, lack of motivation and lack of organizational commitment directly interfere in the increase of the employees' turnover intentions, it has been listed, as from the obtained results from the application of the questionnaires to the servers of the institution in study, six of the main factors capable of acting negatively in this process, proposing actions to each of the selected critical factors in order to mitigate their damages to work satisfaction, motivation and organizational commitment, with the aim of consequently increasing the capacity of the Institution in question to retain its talents.
1) For the question of the overcrowding of the server in sectors where activities considered uninteresting or to which there’s no aptitude possessed, the cause may rest in the fact that while joining the Institution, the new servers deliver a curriculum with their personal and professional information in the People Management Directorate - DGP - the board of directors responsible for managing the people in the institution. It turns out that, sometimes, due to factors such as staff shortage, it is not given to the information provided by the entrants at the Institution, the due importance. And, as a result, the servers end up getting crowded in places where they have difficulty adapting, they become discontented and unmotivated.
Another fact that can make it difficult to fill the servers in the appropriate work places for each of them is the lack of feedback between the DGP and the server after joining the institution. A gap ends up being established between the professional advancements of the oldest server's curriculum, with newly acquired skills, and the management of the body. The update is not a systematized process and the initial curriculum gradually becomes lagged from reality.
In order to resolve this impasse, it would be up to the DGP to carefully analyze the personal and professional profile of each new server, from the moment of their entry into force, in order for them to be allocated to the sections or sectors in which they will be most efficient and effective. With the realization of periodic censuses that raise the personal and professional data of the server, the gap of personal and professional information between the servers and the management of the Institution could be fulfilled.
Another action that could be implemented in order to fill the servers, already with the accumulated knowledge of the institution and its activities, to obtain the best performance of each one, would be the creation of a program of interchange registry between servers, in which each participating server would register the sector where it would wish to work and, in case of compatibility, the exchange would occur, as long as there were, also the consent of the respective people responsible for the sectors.
2) The second factor about the lack of flexibility in the server’s working schedule is an actual and relevant question, mainly if considered the profile of the new generations. Given that financial factors are much more attractive in many other careers of the federal public service, that institution ends up losing a good part of its servers to other public institutions. One of the possibilities to minimize this process can be presented by the adoption of a more flexible schedule for the employee, the advantage of which would be to allow the employee to organize his working moments in the most advantageous way for himself.
The individual, social and organizational demands point to the adoption of flexible working arrangements. The individuals need a bigger flexibility and control in relation to the time and place of work, in order to feel their lives more balanced (SUH; LEE, 2017).
According to the Brazilian Federal Constitution, in its 6th article, the social rights of all workers are provided, such as education, health - both physical and mental -, food, work, transportation and leisure (BRAZIL, 1988). And a more flexible working schedule would help ensure that there is sufficient time for the employees to properly enjoy the social rights that assist them.
Adopting measures that make the worker's journey more flexible, without prejudice to the 40 hours, except for some exceptions provided for by law, which must be worked per week, can become a differential and weigh favorably to permanence in the decision of the server to exchange organs. To this end, managers could, within the reality of each directorate, sector or section, concentrate efforts to individually verify, within the preferences of each server, how he would like to organize his working day, without prejudice to the workload provided for in the legislation.
Another proposal would be the creation of a bank of hours, used in diverse mixed economy or private companies where the server could be absent from work, with the consent of his management and without discounts on his salary for absence and compensate later by working a few more hours a day during a period. Such a move would enable the server to manage personal matters more peacefully and securely.
3) The third factor recognized as critical is the lack of professional recognition. It is a situation that can negatively affect the professional's self-esteem and inevitably generate a feeling of injustice and devaluation, being, in this way, capable of enhancing the professional's intention of turnover.
In order to reverse this situation, managers must adopt a posture of valuing the talents of their team, concerning themselves with always being attentive to recognizing the qualities and strengths of their group, in realizing the commitment and the role of each server for the whole. This measure can attenuate the appearance of the characteristic sense of injustice, which a server tends to feel when not having the well-done accomplishment of a task, or the proposal of new ideas, adequately noticed, by his peers or superiors.
Since, due to legal restrictions, it is not possible to financially subsidize the server that stands out from the others, an alternative that can positively influence the decrease in the sense of lack of recognition is to establish an institutional rewards program where the Institution would reward the good performance of the employee, rather than financially, with days off, for example. Another mechanism to be used is the public recognition through the institutional website or at a monthly collective event with the presence of the whole staff. A personalized document, also, is able to generate good effects for its capacity of being shared with friends and family.
4) The following point presented by the research is the dissatisfaction with superiors and leaderships. It’s possible that the dissatisfaction with hierarchical superiors can generate a great deal of stress on the server and, consequently, affect their satisfaction. This finding is in line with Harris, Harris e Harvey (2008), who assert that managers are able to reinforce or reduce the pressure on the server, increasing or decreasing the intention of turnover of that category.
However, there is still no policy in the institution to systematically raise the awareness of leaders and managers about their role, which is fundamental in maintaining job satisfaction and employee motivation.
An important action to weaken this critical factor would be the implementation of a program, which can be done through lectures, turned to the awareness of the influence of management and leadership in job satisfaction and organizational climate, the harm that the various types of harassment, by the managements, can cause to organizational results in order to discourage them, and the importance of the good relationship of the managements with their employees for the integration of the team.
The Multisource Feedback-MSF, also known as feedback 360°, could be used as a form of leadership development, for being a process in which a leader receives an anonymous feedback from subordinates, colleagues, chiefs and clients, as a way of raising the knowledge of essential aspects for the development of the leadership (ATWATER; BRETT; CHARLES, 2007).
And, in severe cases of server-management relationship problems, where awareness-raising measures and evaluations are ineffective, create an institutional mentality in the agency to facilitate the relocation of the employee to a section where the employee has a better relationship with the manager.
5) The fifth critical factor is the lack of autonomy of the server in realizing work-related tasks. Because it is a federal authority, its employees have less autonomy in their work activities than employees of a private market organization. However, within the legal limits, it is possible to offer the professional of the institution some margin of autonomy.
Certainly, autonomy should not be granted to all servers indistinctly. Because it must be conquered by demonstrating qualities of maturity, common sense and responsibility on the part of the servers. However, allowing a certain autonomy in their actions can generate greater efficiency in the work routine. Nevertheless, to this end, senior management must also bear in mind the benefits that by granting autonomy to their subordinates, not only deconcentrating, but actually decentralizing some of the labor responsibilities, can influence their acting performance, such as: time optimization; possibility of focusing attention in situations of greater complexity, especially at a strategic level and decrease the overload of these professionals.
A feasible measure, possible to be carried out, in order to mitigate the damages of this factor would be the creation of a program, which could be carried out through the construction of a working group specifically for this purpose, for the awareness of the managers as to the many benefits of effectively decentralizing part of its decisions and, to the servers, regarding the self-responsibility that the granting of action autonomy demands of the individual who is entrusted with it. In parallel, actions of skills development and attitudes focused on the servers, may be made effective in order to making the managers feel safer throughout the decentralization process
6) Finally, the last detected factor has been the bad relationship between the server and the co-workers. According to Nascimento (2014), Cultural Historical Psychology starts from the premise that man is a social and historical being and, as such, the social context in which it is inserted directly affects its development. In this sense, it can be inferred that in an organizational environment where there are frequent frictions among its members, job satisfaction, in general, among employees, will be severely compromised and, consequently, organizational motivation and commitment as well.
In the surveyed institution, at least globally, there is apparently a good relationship between most of its servers. However, occasional cases of problems in employee relations are bound to happen.
Although not occurring in a generalized and recurrent way, so as to avoid events of this nature, which are certainly harmful to the organizational commitment, the Institution could adopt, as a practice in situations of tension between servers identified at the beginning, immediate intervention of the management team and clear and honest problematization about what happened, not allowing the situation to grow and get out of control because it was ignored when still incipient and fully controllable.
Another way not to remedy, but to prevent a bad relationship among the servers, would be to encourage, by the management of the institution, the accomplishment of events that are able to comprise great part of the school community - birthdays of the month, Brazilian typical June celebrations, end of the year festivities, among others -, creating a sense of integration among all sectors of the organization. Such a sense would tend to approximate and narrow the relations between the servers, not only of the same work department, but of the whole Institution. The appointment of a commission for the purpose of planning such events would be a viable way to effectively implement such actions.
5. CONCLUSIONS
The objective of the current study has been the construction of a proposal of actions for supporting a Federal Education Institution in retaining its servers. It has been achievable to detect after the literature the existence of eight main critical factors that affect work satisfaction, compromise the motivation, and jeopardize the process of establishment of the organizational commitment of the server, including: servers located in sectors where they perform uninteresting activities or for which they do not have aptitude; lack of flexibility in the server's working hours; lack of professional recognition of the server; server dissatisfaction with management and leadership; lack of autonomy of the server in carrying out the activities related to the work and bad relationship of the server with co-workers; low financial return of gratified functions in light of the responsibility of their attributions; low remuneration value of the position being performed; that have been contemplated on the researching instrument applied to the institution servers.
The results have shown that six of these factors are critical and must be taken into account. The factors referring to the financial aspects, although relevant, are from legislative competence and cannot be treated individually by public autarchies.
In order to mitigate or even eradicate the damages caused by such critical factors, especially to the organizational commitment of the servers of the institution in question, it has been proposed practical actions such as a suitable allocation of servers in sectors where they can be more efficient and deliver the best out of their competences; the creation of a bank of hours that allows flexible working hours; the adoption, by the managers, of a policy to value the team's talents; the realization of lectures and/or the creation of working groups to raising the awareness about the role of managers in job satisfaction, feedback 360° and the pros and cons of tasks decentralization, providing autonomy to the servers.
It is expected that, with the possible implementation of these actions, the researched institution will be able to breathe new life into the work satisfaction, the motivation and the organizational commitment of its employees and, as a result, increase the chance of permanence of their employees given the external market harassment.
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