STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING PEOPLE IN A PRIVATE HOSPITAL: AN EXAMPLE OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF POLITICAL-IDEOLOGICAL CONTROL

Abstract

The strategies of people management as a means of political-ideological control, which promotes the workers’ involvement, was one of the themes of a research. This research is a qualitative and quantitative case study, with a transversal cut, developed in a private hospital and presented as a master’s degree thesis. The data was gathered through interviews, observations, document analysis and questionnaires. In the hospital, the authoritative management mechanisms and threat-based processes intimidate divergent behaviors, preventing the emergence of questioning and explicit confrontations, thus making the employees apathetic and yielding to serve the organizational objectives. This management structure finds legitimacy because it is founded in control strategies which heighten submission, enhance acceptance of rules without questioning, increase consent to the organizational demands and to the intense work rhythm and encourage representation of the exploitation actions as something natural, inherent to the job or as favoring to the employee. The effectiveness of the political-ideological control infiltrated in the management strategies was evident not only in the employees’ consent to the organizational objectives, but mainly in the fact that the employees themselves ended up defending and reproducing the organizational system. If the end justifies the means, this hospital organization is a successful enterprise whose effectiveness is in having the objectives met at the cost of exploitation, alienation and real life conditions of the employees.