Governança e sua relação com a fidelidade em cooperativas

Abstract

Historically, the cooperatives are configured as collective arrangements with direct action on the needs of their associates. The cooperative system is expressive in both economic and social aspects, however, it is noticeable that the sector is undergoing a restructuring, given the downward trend in the number of enterprises, and especially in Rio Grande do Sul, where it has decreased of 31% from 2010 to 2013. This reduction in agricultural sector accounted for 14% in the same time period, which reinforces a need for readjustment of the management and governance system in agricultural cooperatives. Whether in literature or in the cooperative sector, it is a recurring approach that the opportunism and the lack of loyalty of members are the central problems faced by cooperatives. These organizations, without the loyalty of members, while they lose the sense of their existence, they also lose the operational and scale efficiency which puts the enterprise in disadvantage in its operating segment. For this thesis context and according to Williamson s approach, the governance is shaped by means of norms, rules, contracts, monitoring and incentives, to guarantee the continuity of a transaction in which potential conflicts threaten the achievement of cooperation. The loyalty of associates to the cooperative is understood as being the main characteristic of the cooperation. Thus, this thesis debates the relationship between the governance adopted by the cooperatives and the loyalty of members. Therefore, it was aimed to analyze gaps in governance of agricultural cooperatives in Rio Grande do Sul and their relationship on the loyalty of associates. This thesis was based upon the New Institutional Economics (NIE) approach: Property Rights, Agency Theory and Transaction Cost Economics. To perform this research, qualitative and quantitative methods were used. The qualitative phase consisted of in-depth interviews with experts in cooperatives. The information was categorized and examined through the technique of content analysis. The quantitative phase was characterized by a questionnaire sent to the agricultural cooperatives of Rio Grande do Sul. Descriptive and multivariate statistics were used. In the multivariate statistics case a factor analysis was performed, so that the sets of factors that influence the loyalty of members could be identified. Afterwards, regression analysis allowed to verify the direction and the intensity of the impact of these factors on loyalty. The main results pointed out that the governance adopted by the cooperatives is not the most efficient, i.e., governance and the offered incentives do not minimize transaction costs in order to maintain (and increase) the loyalty of members with the cooperative. Thus, a conceptual model was proposed for the gaps in governance. The model embraces six dimensions: Contractual Gaps; Operational Gaps; Communication Gaps; Management Gaps; Audit Gaps and Immediate Benefits Offer Gaps. The quantitative analysis indicated that the higher the Audit Committee Effectiveness it tends to be higher the loyalty of members, with about 17% of loyalty explained by the effectiveness of the audit board.