Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Produção

This is a Doctoral Dissertation submited to the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in order to obtain the degree of Doctor in Engeneering. The title “Participative Managing and Productivity: an Ergonomic Approach”, presents clearly what is being discussed. By reading several sources written in several places around the world, contacting with experts in questions about productivity in the organizations and with directors and managers of interprises and laborunions, one can assume that the future management will be, somehow, stablished in the basis of participative processes. Thas has come to be the first hypotheses of this work. With this in mind, it has become interesting to understand how these processes were being obtained. When searching for this understanding, it has become clear that the participative processes which have been experimented presented a great deal of reactive conflict and that they have basically two origins. One of them is the result of the struggle of the labor force, which understanding some advantages of this way of organizing the work, ended up conquering participation, but against the will of the owners of the means of production. The other origin is the opposite of the above. The owners of the means of production, willing to achieve greater productivity, conceived participation to the labor force which, missunderstanding, distrusted and not believing in the process, created barriers to its development. At this time it has become important to study ways of participative processes that would offer final results with less reacting conflitcs.