Welter, Giselle M.R.
INTRODUCTION
Although Szondi (1987) developed the Fate Psychology in the context of Psycopathology, he understood that work may constitute a sole opportunity to canalize drives in a humanized and socialized way, in that, allowing individuals to satisfy their necessities ethically, permitting, at the same time, a positive contribution to society and a mean to acquire social identity. Achtnich (1979), based on this premise, developed an instrument to clarify the professional inclination profile based on the driving factors created by Szondi (1972) and directed to the professional orientation, the BBT – Berufsbilder-Test. In 1991, the BBT was published in Brazil, adapted and validated to the Brazilian culture by Jacquemin (2000).
I started working with the BBT in vocational guidance in 1992. From 1998 onwards, I began using the BBT in adults, candidates in recruiting programs in an automotive multinational company. My aim was to analyze the consonance between the professional inclination profile and the required professional profile for each of the different positions offered by the company. This experience was presented in the Louvain-la-Neuf International Szondi Congress, in 1999. In that occasion, I met Rolf Kenmo (2002), who was presenting a test based on a simplification of Szondi’s theory, focused on the organizational environment and performed via Internet, the HumanGuide®.
The HumanGuide® test is used to determine the motivational profile in accordance with Szondi’s theory, making it accessible to lay people, non psychologists. To answer the test, the respondent shall access the Internet site www.humanguide.se, entering a password previously given by a licensed person. When clicking on the option "perform test", the conditions on performing the test are described with the secrecy terms, subject to acceptance or denial of the respondent. Once the conditions of the test are accepted, he respondent will have access to the proper homepage, where he/she will fill in the formulary on personal data, such as name, company, address, telephone and e-mail. Once the formulary is filled in, the pressing of the enter button will give access to the available profile options: Person Profile (what your personality is like), Ideal Partner Profile (what is your ideal co-worker like), X’s Person Profile (what is your opinion about person X), Job Profile (what does the job require) and culture profile (how is the culture of the company).
The profiles questionnaires consist of nine pages with eight statements each. Each of these statements corresponds to a factor or driving necessity according to Szondi’s theory, totalizing seventy-two sentences. On the head of each page, there are instructions on the way to answer the questionnaire. As in the Szondi test and in the BBT, the respondent must position himself / herself on each statement, choosing four sentences positively (yes), two negatively (no) and not answering two (blank).
After a better acknowledgement of this instrument, I decided to translate it into Portuguese as a manner of introducing it in Brazil. I have been adapting it since 2000 for use in Brazil, focusing at present, on its scientific validation.
In my presentation I will describe the first project in which the concepts of HumanGuide® are fully applied, in a medium sized company of the laundry sector in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.
In October 2003, the chief executive officer (CEO) of this industrial laundry company became interested in the method while searching the Internet on information about Szondi. In our first meeting he pointed out his intention to evaluate the potential of his employees and to develop his teams into high performance teams. We suggested the use of BBT and HumanGuide® in the organizational environment, accentuating the humanist character and the emphasis on human development. After researching the needs of the company, as well as data on its history and development, we created a strategy for evaluation that was well tuned with the spotted necessities and adversities of the company. The project was immediately approved.
Background
The company started on the dream an entrepreneur couple had of managing their own business. For the viability of this project, they should meet three premises: small investment, high profitability and a small amount of work. At first, in 1994, the company began offering self-service laundry system. Gradually, the business blossomed and started to accommodate the laundry facilities of hotels that outsourced their laundries to the company. The number of clients increased and the investments requested for the new equipments and technologies brought the company under obligation. The high investments, the devaluation of Brazilian currency and the increase on the interest rates led the business into decapitalisation. The rapid growth of the business happened without a proper financial basis. Bankruptcy was avoided mainly by the CEO’s negotiation skills and commitment to paying all debts. As a way of searching for capital, the company was turned into a Corporation. There was a great tension among the staff, once the company was marked by a high personal commitment, which had, to that moment, compensated structural failures, fact unknown by the clients. Every solution searched by the group was intuitive. The crisis led to a reevaluation of the company’s structure. The owners came to the conclusion that the main source of problems resided on the organization’s culture: excessive waist, paternalism, informal management, liberalism, accommodation based on previous good results, tolerance, blaming bad results on external factors and inertia. Their usual policy was to trust all decisions on the common sense of their employees and allow the team alone to figure out the best way to reach their clients wishes; and work hard. When the business became a Corporation, there was a need to refocus the management in order to answer to shareholders. Questions such as profitability, are we really the best laundry in the market, how can we be the best and still have competitive prices, started to be made. It was observed that little attention was paid to preserving existing resources, to a search for better ways of performing all processes, to lessening production costs, to the structure of the company, to the control of processes, to financial analysis, to the establishment of guidelines, to objective indicatives and to supervision of processes. As a strategic solution, the company hired, in July 2003, a consulting firm specialized in productivity and, aiming an enhancement in high performance teams, a consulting firm specialized in human resources.
The company holds today about 1000 employees, and has branches in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia states (Northeast). The main segments covered by the company are trousseau, personal clothes and industrial uniforms of pharmaceutical industries and hospitals. The annual sales amount to US$ 25 million.
OBJECTIVES
The consultancy was performed using Szondi’s Theory of Personality (1987) and the concepts developed by Achtnich for the organizational environment (1979) and with the HumanGuideÒ concepts (2003). Four main objectives were targeted: evaluation of the employee’s potential, occupational alignment, team chemistry and a characterization of the culture of the company.
METHOD
Participants
Seventy employees from heading (directors, managers and leaders) or administrative positions, from both genders and of different socioeconomic backgrounds, that worked in operation, administration, finance, customer service and human resources participated in the project.
Procedures
The objective of the employee’s potential evaluation was: To identify the strengths and weaknesses of the employees with less schooling by submitting the group to the BBT – vocational selection test (Achtnich, 1979) and to evaluate the profile of professional requirements in employees that concluded High School or with University degrees, using HumanGuide®, via Internet. The evaluation was complemented by submitting these employees to an abstract reasoning and a logic-reasoning test, to an administration of time test and to focused attention test. All the HumanGuide® profiles had been previously validated with each employee by the handout of a report, debates on strengths and weaknesses and the elaboration of a mini-profile (identification tag). The resulting profiles originated from the group response to the BBT were handed out to the employees with a summarized report on the findings. The evaluation was put into context and the main concepts were explained to the group. After the explanation, doubts were cleared individually.
The occupational alignment was used to access the potential of managers and directors, to evaluate the compatibility between individual necessities and potential and requirements of the job (individually), identify training and capacitating requirements, plan an individual attendance, focusing on the Person Compass and on the elaboration of a Future Plan, relocate, whenever necessary, employees to jobs more suitable for their skills and to the company’s needs. For that purpose, a consonance analysis between Person Profile and Job Profile was made, identifying the gaps, aversions and lack of the possibility of fulfilling the identified necessities. The results were discussed individually, accessing possible risks and searching to identify ways to prevent and point out other possibilities of professional development.
The group synergy had as main target: Characterize the different teams and situate them in the broader context of the company, identify the strengths and weaknesses (risks) of teams, identify the contribution of each member to the synergy of the team (functional roll), favor the cooperation within the group, elaborate the Team Compass as a parameter of group development, define goals for the team and develop strategies for their achievement and means to monitor this achievement. There were three meetings with each team. In the first meeting, the Team Profile, its strengths and weaknesses and the relation between these issues and the mission of the team were analyzed as well as the recognition of the positive contribution each individual may give to the attainment of the objectives. In the other meetings, some activities were performed aiming the interpersonal awareness, as an adapted form of the Johari Window Model, in which after an initial phase of self-evaluation and evaluation of the colleagues, the participants must compare the contents of the test, and the Open Windows game, in which the participants must guess the reactions and affinities of the colleagues.
The characterization of the corporate culture had four main objectives: Analyze the cultural profile of the company, identifying it’s characteristics, strengths and weaknesses (risks); determine the desired culture profile, aligned with the strategic objectives previously defined by the statutory directors; identify and analyze the differences between the present culture profile and the desired one; create the Culture Compass of the company and define strategic goals. The characterization was made by the study of 31 Culture Profiles, via web, by a representative group of employees that had already done the Person Profile. The profiles thus obtained were condensed into a synthesis of the culture profile, which was compared with the institutional culture profile, established by the analysis of the institutional material (homepage, posters and internal communications), in which the "workshop on the culture of the company" was based, and included all participants in this group.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The results of the evaluation of potential and occupational alignment resulted in the reformulation of the organization diagram. This reformulation aimed to make the best of personal characteristics and to provide better opportunities for employees within the company. There were many horizontal changes and promotions, in the head office and in the branches. Many employees that earned promotions and that changed position in the company recognized the importance of the evaluation that was performed, in this way contributing to the acceptance of the consulting project. In the beginning, there was a general fear of dismissals, but soon, this feeling was defeated by the new challenge and by the perspective of personal development.
The Team Chemistry contributed for a better mutual understanding, as the employees began monitoring their own behavior based on the feedbacks they received. There was a significant drop in impulsive reactions and in aggressiveness as a result of a better self-understanding and that of others. Now, teams are focused on their tasks, wasting much less energy in defensive behavior.
Throughout the first semester of 2004, 31 employees of the head Office in São Paulo, 6 from Rio de Janeiro branch and 8 from the Northeast branch performed the HumanGuideÒ Culture Profile. The results are summarized in the graphic below.
The graphic shows a high perception of the employees on imagination, contacts and power. Second in mind come structure, exposure and quality. Less perceived are relation, and stability. This result is detailed in the following table, where the mean values are described.
Table 1 - T-test of the Culture Profile factors.
Table2 - One-Sample Test of the Culture Profile factors
The perception of the factors Power (t(30)=-2,868; p=0,007), Imagination (t(30)=3,998; p<0,001) and Contacts (t(30)=3,700; p=0,001) is significantly stronger than of the mean factors Quality, Exposure and Structure. At the other hand, the perception of the factors Relation (t(30)=-30,85; p=0,004) and Stability (t(30)=-4,503; p<0,001) is significantly weak than the mean factors, too.
These results explain the development of the company during the 10 years of its existence. In this period of time, the company stood out as very innovative, by conjecturing and creating new possibilities, full of energy, fast on decision making and determinate, earning clients due to a good networking. The main features of its Culture Profile are based on a collection of resources the company owns and manages to use in an integrate way, assuring the development and securing a competitive advantage.
Besides imagination, contacts and power, other resources were considered relevant as necessary means for managing the business successfully: structure, exposure and quality. However, these issues do not appear as very stable, as lack of focus and loss in quality are thought to be problems that may diminish the competitive advantage as are deficiencies in organization, control and method, small commitment and quality and lack of availability for developing people. The responses to exposure, with relative low grades, points out the small effort put into the image of the company and actions that could make its name more known to the market, meaning that there is no clear marketing strategy.
The low grading for stability reveals a lack of continuity, small regard for costs and fragmentation of processes, a possible inexistence of documentation and registries and little importance paid to strong bonds with clients and suppliers.
The low grading of the relation item reveals the lack of effort put into understanding and attending to the demands of customers, neglecting their special requests. In the same way, there is little sensibility and receptivity toward the necessities of the employees, who feel crushed, not considered and not appreciated.
As we could see, the Culture Profile reflects most problems previously pointed out by the CEO. They require a corrective action based on the development of abilities and competence associated with the less graded issues and at the same time, controlling a possible negative impact on the well graded issues.
Based on this analysis, a workshop about the culture of the company was held. The conclusions of this research were presented and the participants were invited to elaborate concrete propositions to surpass the identified problems – trying to rationally find solutions to compensate the less graded issues. Some of the strategic decisions for 2005 originated in this workshop, such as: reformulation of the human resources department, where a data base is being created and in which information about all employees will be filed, such as schooling, technical skills or university degrees, training programs, professional experience and laborite documentations; implementation of weekly meetings in operation and between departments, keeping everyone informed about the strategic goals of the company and of the department, as well as the daily problems; implementation of a coaching program for the staff, aiming to improve their abilities and trying to diminish the turnover; giving support to the productivity program and make daily measurements in all different stages of the process; creating a consumer service department, where comments, queries and suggestions can be made by clients and focus in analyzing and finding possible solutions; continuation of the Team Chemistry program, enhancing cooperation and a team work towards the achievement of goals and objectives of the company.
CONCLUSION
The results obtained by the use of HumanGuide® concepts and method, showed that it is possible to work with organization development, with teams as well as individuals, using Szondi’s theory as main guideline. Although the context in a work environment is very diverse of that one considered by Szondi, when we deal with issues concerning motivation for work and affinity with certain people and situations, we seek to always favor personal accomplishments in different situations, through the conjunction of necessities and possibilities of achieving them. This experience confirmed the possibility of preventive actions and organizational diagnosis by means of Fate Psychology in the organizational context.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Achtnich, M. (1979). BBT – Berufsbilder-Test. Bern: Verlag Hans Huber
Achtnich, M. (1991). BBT – Teste de Fotos de Profissões. São Paulo: Cetepp.
Jacquemin, A. (2000). BBT-br – O Teste de Fotos de Profissões: Normas – Adaptação Brasileira – Estudos de Caso. São Paulo: Cetepp.
Kenmo, R.(2002). Let the personalities bloom – A path towards life balance in your living space. Stockholm: © Humankonsult AB, Rolf Kenmo.
Szondi, L. (1972) Lehrbuch der experimentelle Triebdiagnostik. Band – Textband. Bern: Verlag Hans Huber.
Szondi, L. (1987) Schicksalsnalyse: Wahl in Liebe, Freundschaft, Beruf, Krankheit und Tod. (pp. 260-262). Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co AG
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