Cultura organizacional no contexto do teletrabalho e sua relação com os vínculos psicológicos da identificação e do comprometimento organizacionais

Abstract

Telework is characterized as a work modality in which activities are carried out outside the company's physical premises using information and communication technologies. The absence of face-to-face interaction has made it difficult for many individuals to connect with the organization, redefining how employees perceive, experience, and sustain organizational culture and their psychological bonds with their employer. The central question of this thesis focuses on the cognitions regarding organizational identification and commitment for information technology teleworkers who perceive and experience their organizations' culture through physical organizational distance. From a more specific perspective, the thesis seeks to contemplate the proposal of constructing three scientific articles, which have the following guiding questions: I) how has organizational culture been discussed in national and international research in the context of telework?; II) how do organizational culture, identification, and commitment articulate themselves in the condition of telework?; III) how does identification and commitment occur for information technology (IT) workers who experience an organizational culture remotely? This research is characterized as a qualitative, descriptive, and exploratory study. The first study involved a scoping review using content analysis to examine articles collected from the Scopus, Web of Science, and SciELO databases. The second study analyzed, through the construction of a framework, how organizational culture, identification, and commitment relate to the context of telework. In the third study, characterized as empirical, 21 semi-structured interviews were conducted with information technology professionals based on the Cognitive-Reflective Approach (CRA), and the results were analyzed using content analysis.The results of the first article showed that organizational culture has been discussed in telework research from three main perspectives: I) as a challenge; II) as an element impacted by physical distancing; and III) as a facilitating solution for the practice of telework. The theoretical framework of the second article assumed that teleworkers experience the levels of organizational culture differently and that the psychological bonds of organizational identification and commitment are also constructed differently from those observed in face-to face organizational experiences. Finally, the third article showed that organizational identification and commitment can be significant even in telework, and both were perceived in all their dimensions. However, the absence of physical interactions and the way in which the artifacts, values, and assumptions of the culture are understood corroborate the particularities of the teleworker's understanding of these bonds. The thesis's overall conclusion suggests that, even with specificities, both organizational identification and commitment can flourish among IT teleworkers. This study provided theoretical, methodological, organizational, and social contributions. Theoretically, it advanced by presenting a framework that will help in understanding how these constructs began to relate after the critical moment conferred by the Covid-19 pandemic and the new reality emerging from the context of telework. Furthermore, it contributed to the advancement of research on organizational identification in its expanded model (Kreiner; Ashforth, 2004), as well as to the strengthening and development of qualitative research that uses Meyer and Allen's (1991) three-dimensional model of organizational commitment. Similarly, analyzing identification and commitment together confirmed that these two constructs are connections of distinct natures that relate to each other and enable the occurrence of profiles that can be explored in future studies. Methodologically, ACR made it possible to access important cognitions regarding the assumptions of organizational culture. For organizations, it contributed by helping them understand and have important information to act in strengthening their culture and the psychological bonds analyzed here in the context of teleworking, mitigating behaviors that weaken the individual/organization connection.