Conhecimento dos gestores industriais sobre custos logísticos: construção de um instrumento de medida com base na teoria da resposta ao item

Abstract

The manager or responsible for the logistical procedures represents an asset for a company’s competitiveness. For this reason, such professionals need awareness on which are the logistical costs of an industrial company and how they work. In this respect, industrial managers’ awareness on such costs inspired the present study. Thus, the theory of Item Response is presented as a statistical tool used at the construction and validation of the measuring instrument. For this purpose, the following research-question was made: How the RIT can contribute for the elaboration of a measuring instrument that allows the measurement of industrial managers’ awareness in terms of logistical costs? Within this perspective the study aimed to elaborate and validate a measuring instrument based on RIT to measure the above-mentioned awareness in conformity with the definitions and theoretical conceptions defined by the Scientific and Academic community. Methodologically speaking, a set of items related to the concepts about logistical costs was created, bringing questions which varied from easy to hard levels. The measuring instrument was applied to the managers of the industrial field of Santa Maria, which answered the questionnaire and provided the necessary data for the measurement. The analysis of the data started by testing the reliability of the measurement instrument through Alpha-Cronbach. Information based on the RIT was presented and analyzed involving the Biserial Correlation, the interpretation of parameters A and B and the analysis of the characteristic curves of items. Therefore, from the 30 items composing the questionnaire, 2 were disregarded for their lack of reliability and 28 were approved, constituting then the instrument to measure the managers’ awareness about logistical costs.