Papel do consultor externo de gestão de pessoas: percepção do consultor e do cliente

Abstract

The present work aims to identify the role of the external consultant in companies, in the field of people management, from the perspective of the consultants themselves as well as the customers’. The study was carried out by means of exploratory qualitative research, having 22 semi-structured interviews – being half (11) of the interviewees consultants that provide outsourced services to companies and half of them (11) customers, representatives of 11 companies (from Rio Grande do Sul) that have employment links with the organizations served by the consultants. For treating the data, we adopted the Analysis of Content with the assistance of NVivo 10 software – being 9 category defined a priori from the interview script, which emerged in the analysis of 46 subcategories. The main results in each knot are: 1) the career of the external consultant is based on four kinds of influence: search for market replacement, referral, career choice or it simply happened. 2) The customers, in the process of consultancy, are the strategical leaderships, intermediate leaderships and human resources professionals. 3) The criteria adopted by customers to choose a consultant are: referral, experience, previous work (background), events/lectures, as well as academic education. 4) the ones who benefit from the process tend to be the ones directly involved and/or all the contributors at the company. 5) The difficulties spotted in the work of a consultant are: resistance to changes, alignment of expectations, creating an accurate diagnosis, dealing with conflicts, establishing a trustful relationship, layoffs, psychic illnesses of key people in the organization and little strategic human resources department. 6) The ease is: knowledge and experience in people management, a look/perspective from outside, trust for being a facilitator in the process, impartiality, having someone to count on, autonomy, celerity and productivity to the process and costs. 7) The contributions resulting from the work of the consultant are: diagnosis and proposal of solution, improvement in the relations and organizational environment, development of people and teams, change management, improvement in process and succession. 8) The points of improvement in the work of a consultant are: follow-up of the learning process, professionalism, method improving, knowing the company culture more deeply, presenting indicators of the results of his/her own work and providing customized services. 9) The present research also identified that the consultant is perceived as a leadership in organizations, since he/she has an influence, inspires changes and eases learning.