Job candidate motivation to work for agricultural corporations: Approach from human resource management

Abstract

Although Japanese agriculture faces serious issues such as aging and decreasing farmers, the number of people working in the farming sector with employment in agricultural corporations is increasing. On the other hand, agricultural corporations in Japan face problems of workers quitting their jobs at an early stage of employment, this indicates there exists a mismatch of employment in the agricultural corporations. However, existing studies on Human Resource Management in Japan mainly focus on the consciousness of managers and employees in agricultural corporations, although it is necessary to understand job candidates for the agricultural corporations to reduce the problems in mismatches. Therefore, the aim of this study was to clarify the characteristics of attributes and motivation toward work in job candidates at agricultural corporations by analyzing the results of an interview survey, group-interview and questionnaire survey with simple and cross tabulations and quantitative analysis. The following analytical results were obtained. First, job candidates for agricultural corporations as a whole have “Personal intentions” and “Work-Life balance intentions” as motivation to work. However, the results from career intention show that candidates who want to be an independent farm manager have “Search intentions” and “Challenge intentions”. Candidates who want to be a manager of an agricultural corporation have “Search intentions” and “Personal intentions”. Candidates who want to engage in farm work have “Work-Life balance intentions”. In contrast, candidates who want to obtain a job have “Passive and Stable intentions”. Additionally, from the results of the quantitative analysis on significant differences in previous employment, agricultural experience, social insurance and request for working hours for candidates who have definite purposes were obtained. Furthermore, significant differences in agricultural experience, sustainability of management, support for independence, vacation days and work values for candidates who want to be an independent farm manager, want to join management and want to engage in farm work were also obtained as well. Based on the results discussed above, we conclude the management side of agricultural corporations need to check the mismatchs between strategy for employment and consciousness of job candidates to provide effective HRM policies and practices for improving problem of mismatch in agricultural corporations. However, the results of the interview-survey clarified that government projects lack long-term perspective toward employment and human resource cultivation in agricultural corporations.