O assédio moral na trajetória profissional de mulheres gerentes: evidências nas histórias de vida

Abstract

The moral harassment is a theme that is gaining space in discussions about the Brazilian society, in the academy and also inside the organizations, especially with articles and denounces conveyed through the press. The organizational context based on productivity andcompetitiveness demands modern managerial policies and a new profile of the worker, what, which allied to unemployment and social exclusion, favors an environment of authoritarianism, submission and discipline that generates - stress, emotional instability, insecurity and distrust - on the workers. The companies, within this argument, can fragilizetheir employees in order to reach their own goals, being complaisant with certain abuses of power and contributing to the growth of forms of moral harassment, mainly when in the hands of perverse individuals or even companies inside a perverse system. The moral harassment isalso linked to the attitudes of individuals with power in the organization, who use administrative practices to harass individuals by using pretexts of increments of productivity. In Brazil - due to its strong patriarchal characteristics and because of the increase on the number of women participation in various levels of the companies - the moral harassment can become critical as it is, generally, correlated to power and competitiveness disputes. This research had the objective of evidencing the moral harassment experienced on the professional trajectory of women managers, bringing to the administrative studies thediscussion of this important and contemporary subject, with not completely explored variables: harassed woman and management. To investigate this objective, the following questions posed as guidelines: how the manager related with the professionals and with thework in her environment; the moral harassment which the manager had suffered during her professional path - relating the answers to the categories of Hirigoyen (2002a, b); the consequences of moral harassment for the manager; how the manager is trying to free herselfor got rid of moral harassment process. The subjects of the research were twelve women managers who declared themselves harassed - occupying managerial posts for at least one year in average and large private companies of the manufacturing or services industry locatedin the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and with professional career superior the five years. In order to achieve the purpose of the research, the data was collected through life histories with participative investigation technique. The managers were asked to describe their professional trajectories, including difficulties and conquests. In order to allow the reading of the life histories, the Discourse Analysis methodology was employed, revealing the semantic paths - including themes and figures, subsets in its interior - so that to detail the levels of analysis and the persuasive strategies (lexical selection, relation between implicit and explicit, building of discursive characters and silencing). This methodological strategy allowed the construction of three semantic paths that complement each other: relations with the professionals; relations with the work and moral harassment; which permitted to observe thatpower relations present in the working environment bring possibilities of an old reading of what is called today moral harassment.