O PERFIL DOS GESTORES: UM ESTUDO EXPLORATóRIO DOS MODELOS MENTAIS E DAS COMPETêNCIAS

The performance of the organizations depends on the quality of its humans resources (NAQVI, 2009). In this matter, the concern with the mental models and the team skills demonstrates to be an essential activity to leverage a better organizational performance. From an exploratory study with two hundred and ninety four managers of private organizations from several segments of business located in the mountain region of Rio Grande of South, this study objective is to identify how managers configure their mental models about the concept of manager and have a better understanding about which skills are more present in this managers. Being the mental models a systemic construction, it may be configured from the assortment of sensitive, symbolic, cognitive, emotional and axiomatic elements (DE TONI, 2005; SCHUKER et al.,2009), that for the managers analyzed there is a bigger emphasis to the rational dimension and a small one on the emotional dimension. The professional skills that prevail in their mental models are the managerial and technic or functional. What was also observed was that the human skills, such as ethics, initiative, the awareness of quality at work, the creativity, the opening to changes and the learning are the skills that are more encouraged and appreciated by the managers on the team. The mental models and the skills are factors that influences the behavior of the managers and consequently on the organizational performance.