R&D Employee Tenure in MNC Subsidiaries: The Role of Institutional Distance and Experience (WITHDRAWN)

Long tenure of research and development (R&D) employees helps organisations to utilise employees’ knowledge over a sustained time period and to strengthen their competitive advantage. It also allows organisations to benefit from the return on the investments made on training their R&D employees. Thus, it is important to identify the determinants of R&D employees’ tenure and design appropriate R&D employee retention strategies. This paper analyses the factors that explain the tenure of R&D employees in the subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs). Building on institutional theory, we claim that formal and informal institutional distance between MNCs’ home and host country might lead to early departure from subsidiaries. We suggest that experience plays a moderating role at both the micro-level (i.e., at the individual employee level) and macro-level (i.e., at the MNC subsidiary level). We find support for our hypotheses mobilising an original database that combines patent data and the LinkedIn profiles of 988 R&D employees in 272 MNC subsidiaries in India.