A Adoção de Proxies Informacionais em Alternativa à Ausência de Mecanismos Formais de Controle Gerencial em Startups

Abstract

The general objective of this study was to understand how the startups management process occurs through the use of informational proxies as an alternative to the absence of formal management control mechanisms. To achieve this objective, the basic or generic qualitative research suggested by Merriam (1998) and Caelli, Ray and Mill (2003) was adopted as a strategy. Therefore, seven startups were selected, having as main criteria the stages of the business and the diversity of the area / segment in which they operate. Thus, seven entrepreneurs who had diverse basic and complementary training, as well as varied professional experiences were interviewed. Regarding the findings, it was observed that startups adopt informational proxies to be the foundation in the construction of organizational discourses and these are inserted in four major categories or dimensions. These dimensions are related to planning, financial controls, marketing aspects and personnel controls. The identified proxies are usually derived from formal artifacts and behave as auxiliary instruments to entrepreneurs / managers in the decision-making process and in aligning their actions with the organization's objectives. These informal controls come from artifacts such as: a) Strategic Planning; b) Benchmarking; c) Business Budget; d) Balanced Scorecard; e) Performance Evaluation; f) Investment Evaluation; g) Customer Profitability Analysis, among others. Finally, the reports obtained and analyzed in this study showed that, if not all, most of the identified proxies contributed, depending on their peculiarities, in the trajectory up to the current moment of the business. In view of the findings and as recommendations for future research, it is suggested that other researchers seek to understand how management controls are configured in Brazilian innovative organizations when startups and when they are characterized as innovative firms, stage where the business model is executed, precisely to check for divergences in terms of management controls throughout the life cycle of an innovative business.