The high turnover rate of the younger generations in Taiwan has for some time been a conundrum that besets local Taiwanese enterprises, as had been discussed in many articles. Most of these articles, however, had attempted to address this issue from the perspective of the assorted personality traits of these younger generations in Taiwan, which in actuality may be a case being unable to see the forest for the trees. By zooming in on the cognitive contradistinction between the generations imposed upon by the times, this research aimed to examine the issue from a macroscopic viewpoint, which hopefully can contribute to a better understanding of the nature of this blight of a phenomenon that is rampant among the younger generations in Taiwan. The R&D sector, wherein solidarity and selfless cooperation are called for so as to achieve breakthroughs and innovation and where human nature is put to the acid test on account of the onerous workload and massive stress, serves as an ideal place to inspect the collision of collectivism versus individualism and the impact thereof. Through in-depth interviews with targeted experienced HR personnel and the revelations of related success and failure stories, this research shed some new lights on the nature of this value mutation/confrontation pattern liable to stage in the workplace of certain graduated developing economies.

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