O universo paralelo do profissional de tecnologia da informação em universidade pública: variáveis externas ao indivíduo e sua relação com procrastinação de tarefas

Abstract

Universities are considered a unique type of organization. In general, its organizational structure can be approximated to a bureaucratic model. In fact, universities are examples of so-called professional bureaucracies. At these institutions, support activities are emphasized as a way to address structural complexity. Among those activities, the adoption and implementation of new information technologies give support to organizational process. The incumbent of developing solutions is the information technology professional. This professional is regarded as having particular personality traits and social behaviors. A reportedly common social behavior at work is task procrastination. Task procrastination means to postpone tasks that should be performed at a given time. Based on the assumption that elements of social structure and agency behavior exert mutual influence, this thesis analyzes the relationship between external variables to the individual and the procrastination of tasks in information technology professionals working in a public university. The motivation is to understand the social behavior of these professionals in the context of public universities, in addition to exploring the phenomenon of task procrastination in the university beyond the activities of students and academics. To that end, 17 information technology professionals working at a public university selected for convenience were interviewed. The results show that there are 31 external variables to the individual that can be associated as causes to task procrastination by these professionals. It is also presented a revealed causal map containing the relationships between each of these 31 variables and task procrastination. Finally, a model of relations between external variables to the individual and task procrastination by IT professionals in public university is presented. The model is a result of the grouping of the 31 variables into 5 higher level constructs, named Task Environment, Organizational Structure, IT Investments, Planning and Institutional Autonomy and IT Professionalization. The proposition of the model is corroborated in light of several existing theories and empirical findings.