O processo grupal da eficácia: uma compreensão sistêmicocomplexa sobre a eficácia de equipes

Abstract

This study aims to understand how effectiveness is conceived in the group process of a work team, one in each company, but with interdependent performance in running a software development project. We attempted to identify the effectiveness factors adopted and the importance attributed to them, over time, by leaders and followers, analyzing them from a systemic-complex understanding. The survey has a longitudinal exploratory qualitative approach, taking as a strategy the collect of qualitative and quantitative data in the initial, the running and the end of the software project. Qualitative data were collected through in-depth interviews and treated by discursive textual analysis. Quantitative data were collected through a questionnaire enclosed and treated for content analysis. It was found that leaders and followers perceive the effectiveness from their assignments, expectations about work and context, characterizing a subjective, temporal and contingent understanding of what is to be effective. We realize that work team’s effectiveness influences and is influenced by the actions and the feedbacks of the context. The work team’s effectiveness has an interdependent relation with variables that go beyond its borders and interfere on its group processes, such as mission and goal of the project, organization and labor resources, quality of interpersonal relationships as communication and cooperation among members, as well as the interdependence between tasks and results with others work teams. A team may not be effective by itself, when immersed in a network of interactions. Therefore, effectiveness in a network of interactions requires a hologramatic vision of the whole and opening for recursive movements between teams/companies that are involved in the project. In this case, the strategies of self-production and self-organization highly effective for a work team need to pervade the network of interactions, as well as the efficacy concepts and factors need to extrapolate the group boundaries and extend into the network of relationships.