Análise do comportamento estratégico e estrutura organizacional nas empresas do setor atacadista e distribuidor de produtos industrializados no Estado do Ceará

Abstract

This study aims at describing the strategic behavior and organizational configuration prevailing in the wholesale companies and manufactured products distributors in the State of Ceará appearing on the 2010 ranking by ABAD - Associação Brasileira de Atacadistas e Distribuidores de Produtos Industrializados (Brazilian Association of Wholesalers and Manufactured Products Distributors). Concerning strategic behavior, the theoretical background for this paper was Miles and Snow’s model (1978), which establishes a correlation among strategy, structure and environment in order to classify companies based on the strategic behavior adopted by them during their adaptive cycle. According to this model, companies may take reactive, prospective, analytical, or defensive behavior in each dimension. In order to describe organizational configuration, the model proposed by Mintzberg and Quinn (2001) was adopted, according to which companies can take professional, mechanized, entrepreneurial, divisionalized, innovative, missionary, and political structures. This descriptive study included the conduction of a survey, having as data-collection instrument a questionnaire sent to the managers of the 21 wholesale companies and manufactured products distributors from Ceará ranked by ABAD (2011). The results indicate that, concerning the entrepreneurial problem, the behavior of the surveyed companies was predominantly reactive, while the analytical strategic behavior was adopted in relation to the engineering and management problems. In terms of organizational configuration, it was found that the mechanized structure model prevailed in the companies analized, and that strategy and structure were mutually related to the companies’ performance and the changes they have been through over the past five years.