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Individual Entrepreneurial Orientation and Talent Retention of Engineers: A Pilot Survey

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Proceedings of the 2nd Advances in Business Research International Conference

Abstract

Solving a crucial shortage of engineers in the internal labour market and a turnover cost are the major concerns to reassess a strong determination of engineers’ behavioural expectations towards current employment. A recent retention problem occurred when organisations rarely highlighted engineers as intrapreneurs. Consequently, engineers’ entrepreneurial behaviours are slowly undebated and limited action has been taken to assess individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) to predict years that remain among talented engineers. Therefore, the objective of this study is to assess the items used for IEO in predicting retention outcome (intention to stay) among Malaysian engineers in manufacturing companies. This study adopted IEO and talent retention (intention to stay) items and a survey that recruited 110 engineers based on convenience sampling technique. Participants were recruited from various manufacturing companies located in Malaysia. Strong evidence was found that innovativeness (0.766), proactiveness (0.793), risk-taking (0.830) and autonomy (0.884) items were reliable (>0.70) for predicting the engineers’ intention to stay (0.879). Developing engineers with IEO behaviours and organisations can closely monitor the mobility of engineers to other jobs. The links between IEO and talent retention interpret a better solution to meet engineers’ career orientations and positive behavioural intentions.

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Correspondence to Idris Osman .

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Osman, I., Noordin, F., Daud, N. (2018). Individual Entrepreneurial Orientation and Talent Retention of Engineers: A Pilot Survey. In: Noordin, F., Othman, A., Kassim, E. (eds) Proceedings of the 2nd Advances in Business Research International Conference. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6053-3_2

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