an Bus¡„ I ABSR î I \ / geacollege Faculty of Entrepreneurship MOTIVATING EXPERTS TO STAY Ivana Grabar University North, Department of business and management, Croatia ivana.grabar@unin.hr Ana Globocnik Zunac* University North, Department of business and management, Croatia ana.globocnik.zunac@unin.hr Sanja Zlatic University North, Department of business and management, Croatia sanja.zlatic@unin.hr Abstract Keeping an expert satisfied is becoming a primary managerial task since more and more people decide to become independent employees or freelancers. Therefore, the question arises: What are organizations ready to do in order to keep them? The purpose of this paper is to explore what employers are willing to do in order to keep an employee who has been working in a key position in the company and has decided to quit and start working as a freelancer. The aim is to investigate whether the company's attitude depends on the size of the company, the area in which it operates, the county where its headquarters are, or their previous experience in hiring a freelancer. The research was conducted in Croatia in June 2018. The results show that employers are aware of the problem. They are to some extent ready to motivate experts with various motivation factors. Key Words HRM; managing experts; motivating experts; motivating talents. 'Corresponding Author Advances in Business-Related Scientific Research Journal, Volume 10, No. 1, 2019 INTRODUCTION AND THEORY Human resource market has changed in the past decades by increasing externalization of employment staff for various jobs. More and more employees decide to design their own work environment and conditions and thus choose to be independent employees, freelancers, or employees of their own small business as a one-man band. A new problem emerges for organizations: experts, as people with very specific knowledge of core business of the organization, tend to leave. Globalization, due to its global competitive possibilities, is only one of the causes that enable experts to move across the large HR market. Competitive advantage of an organization rests on knowledge and, according to Teece (2015), on the ability to motivate experts to create knowledge, help build organizational capabilities and shape strategies. Teece, therefore, emphasizes the importance of intellectual property and of controlling specialized assets. Intellectual property as an aspect of property highlights the importance of knowledge. According to Davenport and Prusak (1997, p. 5) knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information and expert insight that provide a framework for evaluation and incorporation of new experiences and information. Knowledge is not shared around, nor it is free of charge. Teece (1998) talks of knowledge as of intangible assets and says that productive knowledge is typically embodied and thus not possible to be accomplished only by transmitting information, i.e. it is difficult to replicate it. According to him, imitation is nothing else than replication performed by a competitor. From this standpoint, it is not possible to imitate the productive knowledge of an expert. This emphasizes the value of an employee with a specific know-how of a core business activity of an organization. Teece (2015) talks about three important categories of an expert with regard to knowledge creation: the first two are literati and numerati, both marked by high levels of education and experience, and the third very important category is the category of integrators, who synthesize the work of the others. Once an organization recruits an expert with specific knowledge, it is expected to manage their knowledge in a special manner since productive knowledge needs further deployment and use of it. Fleming and Marx (2006), when rethinking the status of technical professionals who span organizational boundaries and, as they say, accelerate the process of invention by contributing to and capitalizing on interfirm 'spillovers' of technical knowledge, claim that managerial attention should focus on identifying, retaining, and enabling gatekeepers, as they named technical experts. Special focus in managing experts should be given to developing creativity. By discussing the impact on creativity of an expert within the organization (Fleming and Marx, 2006), it could be concluded that clustering inventors as experts, for example, will less likely result in new ideas. Though, if a new idea arises, it will be more likely adopted by other inventors. Therefore, they find that cohesion of employees has a negative impact on generating creative ideas, but a positive one when it comes to their development and diffusion. 2 Advances in Business-Related Scientific Research Journal, Volume 10, No. 1, 2019 According to the study of 301 geniuses that had been conducted almost a hundred years ago, Cox (1926) discovered that intelligence alone did not make distinction and it had to be accompanied by tenacity of purpose. Creative thinking has its purpose and is highly asked for in contemporary human resource management since it is the foundation needed for creative problem solving. This requires persistence and intensity connected with strong motivation. Motivation is not a stable dimension of an employee. Therefore, permanent monitoring of managerial motivating processes within HRM is even more prominent. Competitiveness leads to the departure of key experts and benefits for competitors, which Teece (2003) sees as the start of negative processes in which reputation and quality decline. In case experts are unsatisfied, according to Sturman and Trevor (2001), first to quit are those with most education, training and abilities. Motivation of the highest quality experts could be both tangible (financial) and intangible. Teece (2015) says that higher financial motivation will not make up for an unsatisfactory work environment. According to him, dimensions of job environment that matter, or 'quality of work life', include: organization culture, quality of management, challenge of work, and autonomy-afforded employees. METHODS Given that the main purpose of this research is to explore what the employers are willing to do in order to keep the employee who has been working in a key position in the company and has decided to quit and work as a freelancer, the main hypothesis is the following: "In order to retain the employee who has been working in a key position, employers are willing to make concessions regarding the independence of the employee in deciding about the time and place of work." It is followed by an additional hypothesis: "In order to retain the employee who has been working in a key position in the company, employers are willing to give them share in the company." In order to examine which independent variable the attitude of the employer depends on, several additional hypotheses were set: • Employer's attitudes about the concessions which they are willing to make, in order to retain the employee who has been working in a key position, depend on whether they have already hired a freelancer for a job or not. • Employer's attitudes about the concessions which they are willing to make, in order to retain the employee who has been working in a key position, depend on the area in which the company operates. • Employer's attitudes about the concessions which they are willing to make, in order to retain the employee who has been working in a key position, depend on the size of the company. • Employer's attitudes about the concessions which they are willing to make, in order to retain the employee who has been working in a key 3 Advances in Business-Related Scientific Research Journal, Volume 10, No. 1, 2019 position, depend on the county where the headquarters of the company are. Primary data were collected using a questionnaire. The survey was conducted online through the survey tool esurveycreator.com. The target population were small, medium and large companies based in Croatia. An email with the link to the web-based questionnaire was sent to the companies in Croatia by the Croatian Chamber of Commerce. From the 4th to the 25th of June 2018, the survey was completed by 158 respondents. The 70 of the participants were male, 77 females, 9 participants did not want to state their gender, and two of them did not answer the question. One of them was between 18 and 25 years old, 32 of them between 26 and 35 years old, 46 between 36 and 45 years old, 46 between 46 and 55 years old, and 33 of them were older than 55. Respondents were generally familiar with all organizational processes in their company. 99 of them were directors of the company, 12 were members of the board of directors, 18 managers of the company, 12 employees in human resources, and 17 of others. Regarding their educational level, two participants completed their elementary education, 38 participants completed their secondary education, 18 of them completed undergraduate studies, 73 graduate studies, 17 had master's degrees, 7 were university specialists, and 3 of them had doctorates. As it regards the headquarters of the company, only the capital city of the country stands out with 51 (32.3%) head offices of the companies. The seats of other companies are located in other counties, with each county having at least one company having a head office, and none of the counties has more than 10% of the total headquarters of the company. Regarding the size of the company (division according to the Accounting Act (NN 78/15, 134/15)), 111 (70.7%) of the companies were micro (assets up to HRK 2.6 m, revenues up to HRK 5.2 m, average number of employees during the year is 10); 24 (15.3%) small (assets amount up to HRK 30 m, revenues up to HRK 60 m, average number of employees during the business year is 50); 11 (7.0%) medium (assets up to HRK 150 m, income up to HRK 300 m, average number of employees during the year is 250); and 11 (7.0%) were large (crossing the indicators for medium entrepreneurs in two of the three criteria, and regardless of these criteria large entrepreneurs are also banks, savings banks, housing savings banks, electronic money institutions, insurance and reinsurance companies, UCITS management companies, alternative investment fund management companies, factoring companies, investment firms, stock exchanges and even smaller number of other entrepreneurs). The data was analyzed using the SPSS version 22. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION In order to examine what concessions the employers are willing to make to keep the employee working in a key position who has decided to quit and 4 Advances in Business-Related Scientific Research Journal, Volume 10, No. 1, 2019 work as a freelancer, the 5-point Likert scale was used. The question was: "If a key position employee decides to quit and work as a freelancer, what concessions are you willing to make to keep the employee and to what extent?". Eight statements were offered to respondents: "I would not offer anything"; "I would allow the employee to decide independently of their working hours"; "I would allow the employee to decide independently of their place of work"; "I would allow the employee additional education"; "I would allow the employee additional days off"; "I would allow the employee share in the company"; "I would allow the employee to participate in the company's management"; "I would provide the employee with additional financial bonuses". Each of the respondents had to indicate the extent to which they agreed with the statement. The offered answers were as follows: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree. Table 1. Descriptive statistics for the Likert scale of the employers' attitudes about the concessions they are willing to make in order to keep the employee nol oner anylhlnj allow e-rnjiEnye-i 10