The PENSAR® Method: psychosocial governance — Part III: ethical boundaries and evaluation agenda
Keywords:
psychosocial risks, organizational governance, data privacy, organizational ethics, intervention evaluationAbstract
This is the third and final article in the series presenting the PENSAR® Method — a six-stage cycle (Research, Understand, Normalize, Simulate, Apply and Review) proposed as an artifact of organizational psychosocial governance. Whereas the first two parts established the field's operational gap and the architecture of the cycle, this one addresses what makes the artifact usable without turning it into an instrument of surveillance, and what makes it falsifiable. It discusses: the function and limits of the supporting technological layer, whose scope exclusions are deliberate restrictions rather than technical limitations; the privacy requirements derived from the Brazilian General Data Protection Law, with emphasis on effective anonymization and on the suppression threshold as a fixed property of the system; the structural boundary between governance and clinical care, with a prohibition of any individual, named reading by the employer; the grounding in international and Brazilian references, notably ISO 45003:2021, Regulatory Standard No. 1 and Law No. 14,831/2024; and an empirical evaluation agenda with seven falsifiable hypotheses, designs appropriate to field constraints, and indicators organized by latency. It is argued that the model's ethical restrictions do not compete with its effectiveness: they are technical preconditions of its operation.
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