Para a implantação da meritocracia na gestão de carreira: implicações dos contextos cultural, gerencial e político de uma empresa estatal federal brasileira

Abstract

The transformation of the Brazilian Public Management, specifically about the adoption of modern tools for human resources, has been happening since the last century and the concern about the introduction of meritocracy in career management is still considered a recurring theme. An evidence of that is the guidance from management and control department of federal state-owned companies to adopt meritocracy in their career management systems. The organization studied here, although already have passed thirteen years of validity of its current jobs and salaries plan, seems not yet to have been able to establish career management policies based on meritocracy. Due to the problem presented, the main objective of this research focused on raising the implications of the organizational context of a Brazilian federal state-owned company, dependent on the Treasury, for the introduction of meritocracy in career management. An applied qualitative research was carried out, configured in the form of a single case study to map the features of the current cultural, managerial and political contexts and to interpret their implications in the adoption of meritocracy as an organizational value. The research subjects were purposefully selected, among managers and career employees, and interviewed based on a script and from a photograph (photo elicitation) to reveal the current context. The field data were subjected to an inductive hermeneutic analysis. Based on these results, it can be inferred that meritocracy in career management, understood as “a set of criteria, adopted by an organization that has on individual performance, effort and results, the fundamental pillars for granting promotions and progressions to its employees in their own careers”, is not yet explicitly manifested in the studied company. It was perceived that the company is set as a political arena type and that the current alternative process of granting promotions and progressions has been working as a fundamental mechanism for the on going internal power dynamics. On the context found, some manager actions were proposed to contribute to the implementation of meritocracy in career management. It can be considered, as a contribution to the field, the opportunity for reflecting on the negative implications of the penetration of management values in human resources, regarding: uncritical transfer of tools from the private sector to the public one; defense of entrepreneurship discourse that considers the career management as sole responsibility of the professional; only financial and quantitative focus on performance evaluations; and probability of management tools not resulting in professional development but only in the control and exploitation of the individual. For future research it is suggested i.e.: to investigate what commitment means to the organizational members in order to connect it to the company's concepts raised in the study; to analyze meritocracy from the psychological contract breach viewpoint; and to expand this study to other public organizations dependent or not on the Treasury, to ascertain the implications of cultural and managerial traits and the power dynamics for the adoption of meritocracy in career management.