Assédio moral e sofrimento no trabalho de professores universitários em Manaus

Abstract

The objective of this research was to understand the configuration of bullying and its implications for the work of teachers of a public institution of higher education in Manaus. The study was based on theoretical and methodological principles of Dejourian psychodynamics work, which is characterized as qualitative research. The method used was the Work and Action Clinic, which provides a space to discuss and listen to their experiences of pleasure and suffering at work. We held thirteen group sessions with the workers, being one of them a feedback. The results of the Work Clinic with university professors not only suggest the relationship between bullying and the suffering experiences at work, but also the illness of teachers surveyed due to the daily violence directed to them. In the first sessions with this methodology there was the predominance of their speech about the suffering of dealing with authoritarian hierarchical superiors who tried to hurt them in person, seeking to disqualify them professionally, marginalize them and humiliate them by restricting their autonomy or hindering their progress in the project. They highlighted a pathogenic working environment of intense psychological distress, generator of intense psychic suffering and damage to physical and mental health, resulting in employees’ illness, driving them away from work for long periods. They showed the relationship between the peers marked by exacerbated individualism, by competition and lack of cooperation. They reported the feeling of loneliness due to the harassment, gender discrimination and sexism in labor relations, the vulnerability of harassment for being migrants, meritocracy guided by academic productivism, the compartmentalized education. They spoke of a management devoid of an institutional policy for the collective, with colonelist features that privileged groups, which denied bullying, suffering and illness at work. In the course of the clinic, there was the transposition of the speech about the suffering by the perlaboration of this one. Throughout the sessions, the group starts discussing moral harassment in the context of working relationships. And he goes on to talk about the pleasure of working from the relationship with the students and the scientific production, and to carry out a movement aimed at the collective creation of strategies to cope with this problem in the work environment. Thus, we infer that the clinic sessions have reached the desired goals.