Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior of Public Research Institutions

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the organizational behavior of public research organizations based on their human resources development and management. The study here focuses on the largest Italian public research body. The pyramid of R&D people shows the irregular spatial structure of the research personnel per macro regions and the index of seniority indicates older research personnel in the North and Central Part of Italy than in the South Italy. The analysis of human resources displays organizational weaknesses and threats for public research labs generated by research policy based on shrinking public research lab budgets and downsizing of research personnel. Some critical human resource management implications are discussed in order to improve the strategic change and research performances of public research institutions in turbulent and fast-changing markets.

Keywords:

• public research organization
• organizational behavior
• human resource management
• strategic change

Notes

¹ Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) claim that: “strategic change involves an attempt to change current modes of cognition and action to enable the organization to take advantage of important opportunities or to cope with consequential environmental threats” (pp. 433ff).

²The national system of innovation (NSI) refers to the complex network of agents, policies, and institutions supporting the process of technical advance in an economy (Lundvall, 1992). The narrow definition of NSI would include the subsystem research sector represented by universities, and research laboratories, while the broad NSI includes many subsystems such as finance, firms, government, etc. The efficiency of this broad NSI supports economic growth.

The authors in parentheses (MC: Mario Coccia and SR: Secondo Rolfo) have made substantial contributions to the following tasks of research: Conception (MC & SR); Research Design (MC); theoretical framework (MC); acquisition of data (MC); modeling and analysis of data (MC); interpretation of data (MC and SR); drafting of the manuscript (MC); critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content (MC and SR); statistical analyses (MC), supervision (MC and SR). The usual disclaimer holds, however.

³Cf. (Coccia, 2007, 2009d, 2011, 2012a) for a general analysis of R&D trends across countries.

⁴Administrative staff is not analyzed because of lack of data on several years.

⁵For instance, at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) employment contracts are, strictly speaking, all fixed term but some of the contracts are intended to run to the retirement age of the incumbent (usually referred to as permanent or standard contracts; or open ended contract to retirement age), and some are for a specific period of time. Temporary contracts of employment are entered into for a variety of reasons, inter alia:

•	Once-off specific projects, including research projects, that have a definite termination date.
•	Pilot work where future progress is uncertain and is subject to review of the pilot project.
•	…
•	Additional assistance to cover peak period workloads, which might be seasonal or ad hoc. (Note: If the work is a regular operational need, but for only certain months of a year, consideration should be given to a permanent part-time post being established.)
•	Specialized work which is not continuous and is of varying workload (e.g. library cataloguing).
•	Temporary fixed-period appointments of academic staff:
•	Temporary fixed-period appointments (full-time or part-time) are made when available funds do not permit and/or course requirements do not necessitate the establishment and filling of permanent posts.
•	A temporary appointment is for the period indicated in the employment contract, and does not carry any commitment to a permanent appointment.
•	A full-time appointment which has continued on a year-to-year basis for four years, and where consideration is being given to a further one-year contract, must be reviewed by the dean in order to determine the reason for the continued appointment and whether its replacement by a tenured appointment is feasible (either at that point in time or in the next year)

(Retrieved July 5, 2010, http://hr.uct.ac.za/generic.php?m=/conditions/contract_types.php).

⁶ Hull et al. (1978) also show that older scientists are slow to adopt new ideas and may actually impede the progress of science by blocking innovative work of younger scientists.

FIGURE 5 Average age of CNR hiring over 1995–2004 period (color figure available online).

⁷This is because in the past, per law, the maximum age for applications in public administration was 30 years; now, since there are a lot of fixed-term contracts and other temporary contracts, this rule has been dismissed.

⁸The cause of technicians who are older than researchers can also be due to low mobility of technicians towards other organizations in comparison with researchers (that have a high and continuous ‘unidirectional’ mobility towards universities over time).

⁹Fixed-term contracts of research personnel are based on data of the central administration of CNR that pays the salary. We do not consider scholarship and fellowship holders, Ph. D. students, Post-doc positions, etc. because these data are variable during the year and it is difficult to have accurate information from each public research labs.

¹⁰In the UK, the Fixed-Term Employees (Prevention of Less Favorable Treatment) Regulations 2002 were introduced to prevent fixed-term employees from being treated less favorably than comparable permanent employees and to limit the use of successive fixed-term contracts. The regulations state:

	•	The ending of a fixed-term contract should be treated as a redundancy (e.g., relevant notice periods, procedures, and redundancy payments should be applicable).
	•	Fixed term staff should not be discriminated against.
	•	Permanent contracts should be the norm and the use of successive fixed term contracts should be “objectively justified” (cf. Retrieved July 2, 2010, from http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2002/20022034.htm accessed 2nd July 2010)

For instance, the Department of Human Resources at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) is committed to implementing the Regulations on Fixed-term Employees. Accordingly, the University of Glasgow aims to:

	•	protect fixed term contract staff from less favorable treatment;
	•	limit abuse through successive use of fixed term contracts;
	•	reduce the existing number of fixed term contracts; and
	•	ensure that open-ended contracts are the contractual norm rather than fixed term contracts.

Retrieved July 2, 2010, from http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/humanresources/policies/a-g/openend/ftoepolicy/

¹¹low public funding because of austerity packages by governments but also low market funds for the effects of economic recessions.

¹²That is, market-oriented research units are focused on massive increase in technological services rather than fundamental research, therefore there can be a depersonalization of researchers and emptying of the scientific research activity of its main contents: less discovery-based research around longer-term needs centered on public welfare; in other words, business and commercial interests are influencing research units and universities in an unsavory manner, see Musselin (2007), Schuetze (2007).