Engajamento em equipes de projetos à luz da teoria JD-R: modelo de dinâmica de sistemas para o contexto de um parque tecnológico

Abstract

Promoting people engagement in their professional activities is one of the biggest organizations challenges, especially in government entities, considering the system of legal restrictions of the Public Administration. The job demands-resources model (JD-R) theorizes how this phenomenon occurs in organizations through inherent job characteristics that involve 'resources' - factors that facilitate engagement – and 'demands' – factors that can hinder engagement. Considering the importance of engagement to the achievement of organizational objectives, this qualitative research seeks to analyze the dynamics of the engagement of a project team, designed to operationalize a Technology Park, linked to a Brazilian federal public institution of higher education. Following the steps of the Dynamic Systems methodology (STERMAN, 2000), we investigated the activities executed and completed in the project to verify the performance of the team throughout the life cycle. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with members and managers, in order to verify which factors were involved with the engagement construct in a dynamic perspective. The interviews were transcribed and coded, in light of the JD-R model, resulting in a causal diagram with the basic structure of feedacks, representing the dynamics related to this phenomenon. The data suggest that engagement is linked to growth feedbacks credited to recognition for team work and the implementation of project management practices that promote group cohesion among members. In addition, engagement is influenced by equilibrium feedbacks related to the difficulty of reconciling project demands with daily assignments, the lack of support from immediate leadership and the emergence of impediments during the execution of activities. Considering the presence of equilibrium feedbacks, improvement measures were presented for the results found, mainly an engagement measurement tool, so that the engagement of these teams could be diagnosed and leveraged.