Work organization, pleasure and suffering of the public federal professors

Abstract

In the last few years, the increase in vacancies and lecturers number showed the necessity to pay attention to the education’s quality and the professors’ health. This research has descriptive character and aimed to understand the relationship between work organization and pleasure and suffering experiences of professors from a countryside campus of a federal university, using the psychodynamic analysis of work. Semi-structured interviews were done with five professors and the data were analyzed using the technique of content analysis. The study verifies demonstration of pleasure at working through education and research activities and the relationship with students. The suffering experiences refer to interpersonal conflicts and bad infrastructure and overload in the job. Sometimes these sufferings could have a creative destination, through the mobilization of practical intelligence, autonomy and the sublimatory satisfaction provided by the meaning of teaching work.