Estilos cognitivos e comportamentos estratégicos na pandemia COVID-19: uma análise nos microempresários brasileiros e mexicanos dos setores serviços e comércio

Abstract

The strategic behavior of organizations is constantly influenced by the context and the ways of managing two leaders. In microenterprises, the strategies are normally carried out by a single person, or manager-owner, and not by a dominant coalition, as occurs in larger corporations. In this sense, the cognitive style of the decision maker can, in a significant way, influence the strategic behavior adopted by the microenterprise, meaning that this style will affect, or react with, the environment in a determined way. This was aimed at analyzing the relationships existing between cognitive styles, strategic behaviors and management changes during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazilian and Mexican micro-entrepreneurs in two commercial and service sectors. The proposed method for this research is of a quantitative, exploratory, descriptive and correlational nature. 240 micro-entrepreneurs (120 Brazilians and 120 Mexicans) will participate in the study, two commercial and service sectors. For the data collection, the EQEC was created, validated and subsequently tested together with the Questionnaire on Generic Strategies (Miles & Snow, 1978), adapted from Portuguese to Spanish, and an introductory questionnaire that included sociodemographic, business and context information. pandemic. We will carry out factorial, descriptive and correlational analyses. The results will show evidence of significant validity for the EQEC in the Brazilian and Mexican context. The Questionnaire on Generic Strategies also showed significant evidence of validity in the adaptation to Spanish. The cognitive styles “Revolucionário” and “Conquistador” are more predominant both in Brazilian micro-entrepreneurs and in Mexicans. On the other hand, the “Analytical” strategic behavior predominated in Brazilian micro-entrepreneurs, while “Prospect” and “Defensive” predominated in Mexican micro-entrepreneurs. There are significant associations between cognitive styles, strategic behaviors and management changes during the pandemic. The “Conservative” style was positively related to “Defensive” behavior and negatively to “Analytical” and “Prospector” behaviors; The “Revolutionary” style was positively related to the “Prospector” behavior, e; The “Pathfinder” style was positively related to “Analytical” behavior and negatively to “Prospector” behavior. Additionally, the “Conservative” style has a negative relationship with “High” changes in management during the pandemic, and a positive relationship with “Low” changes; The "Constitutionalist" style showed a negative relationship with "High" changes in management during the pandemic, and; The “Revolutionary” style showed a negative relationship with “Low” changes in management during the pandemic, and a positive relationship with “High” changes. Likewise, the "Prospector" behavior showed a positive relationship with "High" changes in management during the pandemic; "Analytical" showed a negative relationship with "Baixas" changes in management during the pandemic, and; “Defensive” showed a positive relationship with “Baixas” movers during the management during the pandemic. Significant associations between the variables and the sociodemographic characteristics (age and sex) were also identified. It was concluded that the EQEC is capable of broadly determining the cognitive styles of two entrepreneurs. It is also shown that most of the participants made decisions in a revolutionary or conquering way during the pandemic, or perhaps, they will innovate in their companies using previous experiences or aggressively, using “Analytical”, “Defensive” or “Prospecting” behaviors. Among the changes in management during the pandemic, new ways of managing, reorganizing the company and developing new products/services are more frequent. I deduce that organizational management is not only influenced by context, but also by cognitive styles and the personal characteristics of the two micro-entrepreneurs.