Reflexões sobre liderança e gestão: estudo exploratório na obra de Rui Barbosa

Abstract

There is a large Brazilian bibliographical production from the 19th century, quite representative of the national socio-political, historical and economic context, with data related to great Brazilian entrepreneurs, leaders and managers. Rui Barbosa stands out from others Brazilian authors who left extensive textual production representative of the national context of those times. It was intended, through this research, to extract elements of his work that could compose an original frame of his thought on issues related to management and leadership in Brazilian context. This research aimed at systematically seek in Rui Barbosa's work elements of his thinking that can be organized into a consistent set of reflections on leadership and management. The methodological procedures of this exploratory and documentary research were drawn from the methodology of content analysis of Bardin and followed three complementary paths: queries in the database of Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, applying OCRBdigital tool; studying two selected volumes from Rui Barbosa Complete Works; and text clustering by the Reinert method (top-down hierarchical classification), with specific software support (IRaMuTeQ). The results of each step were analyzed separately and then consolidated according to the content analysis methodology. The results suggest that the writings of Rui Barbosa address several management and leadership issues and that in some points the themes are even brought to the focus of the narratives; for example, when the central themes of the texts involve management models for public administration, provinces autonomy, decision making models, systems and structures, leadership styles, and flaws and virtues of leaders. It is also suggested that Rui Barbosa's work could be a documentary source for research on history of public administration and memory of organizations in Brazil.