Desenvolvimento de gestores: treinamentos experienciais como caminho para o desenvolvimento de competências

Abstract

Economic globalization and competitiveness pose continuous challenges for companies to keep market differentiation. In this environment of intense pressure and competition, the organization's success depends on the capacity to develop new competences and strategies, and on their capacity to learn quicker than the competitors, depending on people's continuous learning. For such, business groups are creating their own educational institutes and universities, known as “Corporate Universities”, to offer a guided education with the purpose of guaranteeing continuous learning. Corporate universities are present in many Brazilian companies, modeled to contribute to competence developing. One of the trainings offered by corporate universities are the experiential educational programs.The main purpose of this work is to evaluate the adoption of such programs and the perception of effectiveness in their management education, as well as the potential to contribute to the organizational performance and the individual developing of the participants, from the perspective of managers and of the Brazilian Corporate Universities. As theoretical guidelines, Corporate Universities were discussed, as well as competence developing education, experiential learning and management development.The adopted methodology consists in a mixed approach, being qualitative and quantitative, exploratory and descriptive.Multiple cases were approached: four corporate universities were researched, along with experiential learning participants of one of them.Based on a participative observation and semi-structured scripts, the data was collected for processing and evaluated through content analysis. For the quantitative stage, I resorted on a structured instrument, and the data was collected and analyzed statistically by applying descriptive statistic and factorial analysis.The results indicate different stages of adoption of the experiential programs by Brazilian corporate universities, but nonetheless the perceptions are that these programs are important and effective, and that they have effectively been contributing to management competence developing.