Organizational Attractiveness and the R & D Talent Search Challenges at the U. S. National Labs: A Systematic Review

摘要

Public and private knowledge-based organizations in the current high-technology economies rely on the talent of their research and development (R&D) workers for growth and a sustainable competitive advantage. The importance of talented R&D workers to high tech institutions' survival has sparked a war for talent where public and private organizations are increasingly looking to position themselves as attractive employers. The United States National Laboratories is one public sector laboratory most in need of R&D talents. Employment choice literature indicates that organizational attraction exists when there is a compatibility of needs-supplies factors or similarity of fundamental characteristics, or both, between a worker and an organization. Based on person-organization (P-O) fit, this dissertation employed the systematic review methodology to search for, aggregate, and synthetize available scholarly research that studied the effects of organization attractiveness on job seekers' employer of choice decisions. Results from these studies revealed that high-level compensation and competitive entry pay are job attractors. Evidence from these studies also indicated that talented R&D workers tend to favor an organization's cultural and intellectual values over its materialistic values. These findings suggest that the National Labs might utilize intrinsic values such as a creative environment with autonomy, company image and social value, family-friendly policies, revenue sharing, and entrepreneurship to counteract their inability to use responsive monetary compensation in their talent attraction quest. There is a need for future evidence-based studies to investigate the National Labs characteristics that could be successful job attractors and the efficacy of hiring R&D talents at National Labs.