Concepções sobre aprendizagem individual e coletiva na prática em uma organização pública: do quebra-cabeça à reflexão pública

Abstract

The relationship between the worker and the organization has been a reason for scientific research over the years. As well as the changes that occurred in this relationship, which culminated in the strategic approach to human resource management. In this sense, the strategic human resource management is part of the Brazilian public organizations in the quest to modernize their management. This modernization includes the challenge of implementing Decree No. 5,707, which established management by competences as a model to be adopted in the federal public management, whose development of these competences would come from continuous learning. However, because of the different realities of public organizations and their workers in order to develop their competences in day-to-day work, this research was carried out to configure workers’ conceptions about individual and collective learning for the development of their professional competences in their practice. From a qualitative interpretative approach, the single case study was adopted as a research strategy, having as unit of analysis the group of workers from the patrimony’s area of the Federal Center of Technological Education Celso Suckow Fonseca - CEFET/RJ, which are the technical-administrative public servants who work in the permanent staff of the eight campuses of the institution. In order to collect data, fifteen workers from the patrimony’s area of CEFET/RJ were individually interviewed, a participant observation was carried out in five meetings of these workers, as well as a documental research in the institution itself. Through the phenomenological analysis, four conceptions of the phenomenon of individual and collective learning were demonstrated, based on the workers' statements, which reveal how they experience the phenomenon in practice. These conceptions, called by metaphors of the learning process are: (A) Assembling the puzzle; (B) Living and learning; (C) Difficulty is a severe teacher; and (D) Multiple heads are better than one. These workers attributed different meanings to learning, in other words they conceive the individual and collective learning process in different ways as they develop professional competences in the work they realize. The four conceptions together allow us to fully understand the phenomenon of learning in the patrimony’s area of CEFET/RJ, allowing to a broader understanding of the phenomenon's meaning for these workers. The field results also suggest that although the individual and collective levels of learning are perceived in the four conceptions at different intensities, in the conceptions A and B the workers reveal that they predominantly experience the individual level, whereas in the conceptions C and D they reveal the collective level. Finally, it is concluded based on the conceptions that the meaning attributed by workers of the patrimony’s area of CEFET/RJ to the phenomenon of individual and collective learning is multiple and interrelated, revealing "what" and "how" the learning phenomena presents itself to these workers. Among the practical implications of the research, we highlight the stimulus to informal learning promoted by the workers' perception of a formal training lack constituting a way of collective learning. As theoretical implications, the coexistence of individual reflection stimulating the public reflection was revealed