"Se faltar a gente inventa". Estudo sobre crescimento e mudanças organizacionais a partir do caso da APAEB/Valente

Abstract

The current work approaches the subject of organizational growth and change, particularly the relationship between the development of strategies and structural changes. The research aimed to carry out a couple of objectives, such as: describe the process of developing strategies for an organization; interpretate this process taking into account the environment and detecting the main factors that affected the choices made; identify and describe the strategic choices made throughout the history of the organization; correlate the development of strategies and its effects on the organizational structure; understand how the members of the organization implemented their organizational changes. The researcher conducted a qualitative case study, analyzing the APAEB/Valente Association of sustainable and solidaire development of the Sisaleira Region, located at Valente city, at Bahia State. The main results express that the influence of social, economic, institutional and political factors is an important element of the organization-environment relationship, because those factors are taken into account by the organization when developing their strategies. The research revealed that the strategies developed by APAEB/Valente throughout its history were very similar to the strategies developed by its carpet factory, its main business unit. There are few differences between the process which takes place at that kind of business and the process that takes place at that organization. However, the process of strategy development, organizational change and management revealed some specificities of the kind of organization at stake, such as the difficulties to implement decisions, occurrence of conflict and misunderstanding about the roles of different hierarchy levels within the organization and centralization of decisions at the top of organization, mainly at crisis moments. Those findings lead to the conclusion that there is no automatic relationship between strategy and structure, described and demonstrated by the study case, which corroborates the need for a specific approach for the non-capitalistic economic organizations due their particular nature.