Career orientations of R&D professionals in Korea

Abstract

This study empirically examined the relationships between career orientations of R&D professionals in Korea and other personal characteristics such as demographic factors, work-related outcomes, and reward preferences. The results, based on the survey about 1,240 technical people in 15 R&D organizations, revealed five distinctive and independent career orientations: technical, manager, project, technical transfer, and entrepreneurial orientations. The career orientations of R&D professionals are found to be different between private and public sectors and to be associated with their education level and organizational tenure. It is also observed that R&D professionals with different career orientations exhibit different work-related outcomes and reward preferences. For instance, technical-oriented professionals tend to be more educated, to exhibit better job attitudes and technical performances, and to favor professional rewards. While those with manager and transfer orientations are longer-tenured, have more positive job attitudes but lower technical performances, and prefer social status and prestige and career rewards in their organization. Both project-and entrepreneur-oriented professionals exhibit a less positive attitude toward their organizations, but seek different reward schemes: the former pursues challenging R&D projects with autonomy and the latter favors financial returns. Finally, the implications of these findings for managing careers of R&D professionals are discussed.

Investigation of Strategic Changes Using Patent Co-Inventor Network Analysis: The Case of Samsung Electronics

“…R&D effort-strategic resource allocation to R&D projects to improve technological capabilities in specific technological domains-is directly aligned with strategic directions of a firm, because the goal of R&D is basically to obtain technological capabilities for sustaining competitive advantage and companies never spend money on-or allocate their resources to-any business or technology that deviates from their strategic direction. From the resource-based view, intangible resources, mostly human resources, are a major determinant of a firm's decision for internal R&D and R&D human resources generally occupy the most important portion of R&D expenditure [6,9,[14][15][16][17][18][19]. Therefore, R&D human resource allocation can be a proxy variable to represent a firm's R&D efforts on specific technological domains.…”

What Do We Know of the Mobility of Research Scientists and of its Impact on Scientific Production

“…Researchers are being required also to take on increasingly diverse work roles (Blaxter et al, 1998;Kim and Cha, 2000;Enders, 2005), raising concerns about the consequences. Encouragement and reinforcement of knowledge transfer activities and applied research might be working to diminish other traditional academic roles, and to crowd out basic research and the public dissemination of science (Blumenthal et al, 1996;Heller and Eisenberg, 1998).…”

R&D managers' adaptation of firms' HRM practices

“…In particular, the positive relationship between pay and work effort for R&D professionals is stressed in the literature (Manolopoulos, 2006). However, Kim and Cha (2000) argue that management strategies must include the fact that technically oriented R&D professionals, such as inventors, are likely to differ from other groups of employees with respect to their careers, values and reward preferences.…”

“…For this purpose, we looked for firms in different economic sectors, geographical (Greenberg, 1996;Folger and Cropanzano, 1998;Wiesenfeld et al, 2007) Delegation and managerial support (Amabile, 1996;Kim et al, 1999;Christensen, 2000;Pe´rez and Quevedo, 2006) Delegation of decisions, department's project selection process, establishment of the mission and strategy; development of team leadership and allocation of resources to help support and work out ideas Networks and multidisciplinary teams (Chatterji and Thomas, 1993;Sen and Engelhoff, 2000;Sundgren et al, 2005) The presence of collaborative networks: internal (through the creation of multidisciplinary teams) and external (working with clients, suppliers or universities) in the job organization of department workers Psychological arguments about social comparison (Wood, 1989;Taylor et al, 1990;Ployhart et al, 2006) Recruitment policy (Coombs and Rosse, 1992;Saura and Go´mez Mejı´a, 1997) Policies and instruments used to attract the desired workers Job rotation (McGill et al, 1992;Go´mez Mejı´a et al, 2001) The allocation of different tasks or jobs maintaining the same job position or pay Political arguments (Schneider, 1987;Ocasio, 1999;Lepak and Snell, 2002) Remuneration (Saura and Go´mez Mejı´a, 1997;Manolopoulos, 2006) Pay systems. Variable versus fixed pay Career development (Kim and Cha, 2000;Klarsfeld et al, 2003) Career support: Measurement and development of abilities, training, development. Internal promotion markets, competitive positions and top manager's origin.…”