CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT PERFORMANCE OF EXECUTIVES: DEFINITION OF PSYCHO-SOCIAL CONSTRUCT AND DEVELOPMENT OF A MEASUREMENT SCALE.

Organizations through their managers have to lead and support their workers to encourage professional behaviors that are oriented to the development of the continuous improvement processes aiming to three goals: learn to motivate (management has to know how to continuously promote the research for new ways of managing the processes through a greater involvement and development of its workers); motivate to learn (management has to feed and support the cognitive effort of its workers so that they can increase their desire of knowledge and enhance their experience); learn to learn (management has to transfer the working autonomy and responsibility in order to develop in its collaborators the ability to lead the continuous process of improvement, protecting the new ideas born in its working context in order to enlarge the workers professional growth.