Liderança laissez-faire: possibilidades de aprofundamento das discussões

Abstract

Leadership as a phenomenon is present in any social group, it goes beyond the world of work. In the context of work, leadership is present both in companies and in non-profit organizations. The leader is understood as the person who is at the head of the team and, in several situations, is responsible for making decisions and directing the path to be followed by the other members. The laissez-faire leadership, however, has nuances that are little investigated theoretically in the models already validated, as it is a style in which the leader maintains an absent posture. This style becomes even more relevant to social relations in the context of work, since the other styles are guided by conduct by the leader, which, hypothetically, are a positive posture. Thus, its investigation, in a more in-depth way, represents a gap in the current theoretical research, focusing on laissez-faire leadership. In the leadership model developed by Avolio, Bass and Jung (1999) that seeks to investigate three leadership styles, transactional (leadership that is characterized by contingent exchanges); transformational (there is a transformative influence, on the part of the leader) and laissez-faire (bestowal of activities, leader “loose reins”), each style has different dimensions, which allow its investigations. In this model, it is possible to analyze, through the “contingent reward” dimension, present in the transactional leadership model, the implications of the rewards granted by the leader to his followers, rewards that are related to the performance of the followers. This research was supported by the following problem: What are the possibilities for further discussions on the phenomenon that corresponds to laissez-faire leadership? When considering the management of areas of Administration and administrative processes, with a view to human behavior in organizations, the theme leadership is relevant to research, as it is a variable that can change the way people mobilize them to perform a certain work activity. When thinking about the production process, which invariably consists of people, who feel and act in different ways, a connection between management and leadership can become a viable alternative to integrate the diversity of thinking and acting present in the people who compose the teams of workers. Through a quantitative approach, an exploratory, descriptive and survey was carried out. In the empirical investigation, data were collected using a structured questionnaire, containing closed questions using the Likert scale. In the quantitative stage, the scale was validated through confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis, to determine the predictive power of the items that were proposed in the dimensions of laissez-faire leadership and descriptive statistics from the control variables, organizing the sample into terms of sex, salary profile, age, etc. As an answer to the guiding question of this investigation, it was found that the reward omission scale has valid statistical parameters to capture this phenomenon and that laissez-faire leadership can be investigated in a three dimensional, empirically, this implies the possibility of expanding the discussions about this leadership behavior in the work context and its possible impacts and correlations with other phenomena in the workers' working life