Assédio moral sofrido por trabalhadores em home-office, teletrabalho e trabalho presencial durante a pandemia de COVID-19: um estudo sobre o autoritarismo nas relações de trabalho.

Abstract

The theme of the present research is violence at work and its general objective is to understand moral harassment at work during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the period studied, there was a significant increase in the number of people who work in their homes in the form of telework or home office. The study is justified because it is necessary to give visibility to the forms of violence that occur in these types of work and to seek strategies to face moral harassment in the conditions studied. “Violence and harassment” are understood as a set of unacceptable behaviors, threats, or practices, which may occur only once or repeatedly, that aim at, result in or are likely to cause physical, psychological, sexual or economic harm, including violence of gender and harassment. The study is characterized as quantitative and qualitative. The instruments used to produce the data were: sociodemographic questionnaire and professional history adapted from the study by Barreto (2005); Hirigoyen's (2008) adapted questionnaire; LIPT Inventory – Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terror by Leymann (1996) and semi-structured individual interviews. The quantitative results were transferred to an Excel spreadsheet and analyzed using the JASP 0.14.1.0 software, using descriptive statistics to characterize the sample, and the qualitative results were submitted to content analysis. The quantitative results were transferred to an Excel spreadsheet and analyzed using the JASP 0.14.1.0 software, using descriptive statistics to characterize the sample, and the qualitative results were submitted to content analysis. The result of the research points to the maintenance or worsening of the occurrence of moral harassment during the pandemic, characterized by requests for extra working hours through electronic applications, increased work, threat of job loss and neglect of safety protocols. It is noteworthy that some professionals from specific categories felt particularly harassed by the pandemic, for example, firstly, health professionals with threats of dismissal; with direct exposure to the COVID-19 virus without attention and emotional or material support; expansion of working hours indiscriminately and without support to their families, and secondly, teachers, having exposure of their personal lives in the virtual modality, exacerbated demands for immediate learning of the use of new technologies and the perception of being alone responsible for maintaining the teaching quality. Moral harassment is discussed in an expanded perspective, it is identified that this violence is anchored in authoritarianism, especially in bossiness, and in the maintenance of social inequalities present in Brazilian society.