Managing Job-Involvement-Role of R&D Professionals

Abstract

R&D work today has become an important role in many companies. The developing and researching ability greatly influence company's overall competitiveness. For the R&D ability source from R&D professionals mass experience and knowledge, how to effectively manage R&D workers has become an important issue in both academic theory and managerial practice. R&D workers' psychological involvement in job tasks:job involvement-role is conceptualized from conventional job involvement, overcome tits overlap with work centrality in both conceptualization and measurement. Job involvement role is perceived as a better choice also because it is a better predictor to workers' performance and more likely actively react to leadership behavior. Job involvement is proved influenced by leadership behavior, job involvement-role as well. By adjusting the unique characteristics and leadership requirements of R&D organizations (or R&D departments in organizations), as the acknowledge that management in R&D department most likely suffers from lacking of leadership and less person-oriented, leader consideration, participative leadership, and degree of communication are considered as especially important leadership behaviors for R&D workers. Work alienation as a personal-specific characteristic is always substantial in any organization. Past studies always paid their attention on how to lower workers' work alienation so that achieve better organizational effectiveness, but how to effective manage those work alienated workers in the organization is also very important to both academic research and managerial practice. Hence, this study focus on the moderator effect of work alienation to identify which leadership behaviors can better make work alienated individuals better do their job tasks. This study try to identify the moderator effect of work alienation on the relationship of R&D leaders' leadership behaviors influencing subordinates' psychological involvement in job tasks