Human Resources at National Aeronautics and

Space Administration
A Look into the Human Resource Management at a US Federal Knowledge-Based
Organization

By Ngoc Dieu Anh Nguyen

Student ID: 24927749
21407 Strategic Human Resource Management
Tutorial 03 – 13.30
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Abstract

NASA is known for its achievements out of space, but there are down-to-earth issues that it
cannot avoid as well. Strategic human resource management is one of those, one that every
organization must face. In such a knowledge-centric organization, how will the human factor
play out? Will their approach to human resource management be as scientific as the way they
approach the Moon and Mars? This paper aims to investigate the human resource strategies at
this organization through five aspects: leadership style and culture, knowledge management,
employee engagement, motivation, and talent attraction and retention. The paper will also give
recommendations based on the analysis of these aspects.

Table of contents

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 I. Introduction 3
II. Key Findings 3
II.1. Key Attributes of HRM at NASA 3
II.1.1. A Good Leader Makes Employees Feel Safe 3
II.1.2. Even Rocket Science is Transferable 4
II.1.3. Never Too Busy to Talk to Employees 4
II.1.4. A Mix of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards 4
II.1.5. The Future of Work at NASA 5
II.2. Analyzing and Evaluating HRM at NASA 5
II.3. Recommendations 6
II.3.1. Speculation Margin – Loosening the Culture of Data-driven Decisions 6
II.3.2. NASA Science and Engineering Program for the Underrepresented 7
II.3.3. Actionable Hiring Strategy – Nurturing Young Talents 7
II.3.4. All Levels Conference – Engaging Efficiently 7
II.3.5. Partnership in Human Resources 8
III. Conclusion 8
IV. References 9
V. Appendices 10

I. Introduction (aims, method, overview of findings)

The paper looks at NASA from a strategic human resource management perspective to evaluate
its HR practices. NASA can be considered one of the organizations that are on the uncommon
side of choices. After all, space travel can sound far fetching for the most of us, not to mention
how difficult the education is. However, it excites space enthusiasts tremendously, so those who
like it enough to join the organization must be devoted. That said, having passionate employees
will not solve all HR problems of NASA. The paper wants to look at the HRM of an
organization that can filter out enthusiastic employees just by the nature of it as well as the
potential issues. The main methodology is secondary research using journal articles, news
articles, NASA official resources, and interview transcripts. The paper will analyze the specific
case of NASA as well as general frameworks to evaluate NASA’s HRM and come up with
recommendations. Overall, NASA’s strength lies within its knowledge management and

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employee engagement, with motivation being a plus, while having mixed outcomes from its
data-driven culture and facing serious issues with talent recruitment.

II. Key Findings

Key Attributes of HRM at NASA

A Good Leader Makes Employees Feel Safe

NASA managers and the governmental committee in charge of space programs, the Augustine
Committee, emphasize on organizational culture’s impact on performance (McCurdy, 1992).
Ron Thompson – chief data officer and deputy digital transformation officer at NASA – revealed
that his north-star to being a good leader are honesty and giving people courage to deal with
issues. When his employees do not perform well, he gives transparent feedback and even moves
them to better fit roles instead of firing or punishing them (Thompson, 2021). Phillip Meade, the
former associate director of spaceport integration and services at NASA Kennedy Space Center,
claimed that people’s passion at NASA can backfire as they might put goal before safety. People
are data-driven and goal-oriented, so if they feel like something is wrong but lack proof, they
will not speak up. Thus, Meade wanted to create a culture of safety where people could speak up
(Meade, 2023). Overall, it can be seen that the leaders always try to create a participative and
inclusive environment, where employees feel valued and safe.

Even Rocket Science is Transferable

Despite NASA employees being the best in the field, they cannot know everything about
aerodynamics, rocketry, control systems, and so on. Therefore, NASA has created Expert Seeker,
a program that points to someone who has expertise in a certain field so that others can seek for
help (Becerra-Fernandez & Sabherwal, 2005) 10.1504/IJKL.2005.006257.They also set clear criteria
for employees to develop their own knowledge management (KM) plans with three general
steps: learn from other projects, learn within the project, and share project lessons (NASA,
Developing a Knowledge Management (KM) Plan, 2018). The meticulousness in NASA’s KM
strategies do not stop at technical areas but extend to more administrative aspects like team
management. The Goddard Space Flight Centre looked into repeated work processes, and found
that while technical missions were always different, team assembly processes were always
similar (Rogers, 2023). Therefore, they have developed a more systemized and efficient process

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of project team management. It shows NASA’s consistency with their logical approach of
knowledge management across centers as well as across fields, technical or administrative
(Appendix 1).

Never Too Busy to Talk with Employees

Engaging employees in a large organization is never an easy task, yet NASA has been the top of
employee engagement for large federal organizations for years. The key to their success is their
leaders being approachable and supportive. They would ask the supervisors to spend about an
hour with an employee not knowing what they will ask about and open the opportunity to speak
directly with managerial levels to thousands of employees (Friedman, 2022). Furthermore, since
NASA is a particularly special organization, the pioneer in space discoveries, it attracts a certain
group of passionate people who dream about working there since they were little. It is, thus,
crucial for NASA to focus on and stay true to its mission (Fox, 2013). To sum it up,
communication is key to NASA’s outstanding employee engagement rate: whether it be the
personal communications between supervisors and employees or the broad communication of
organizational mission to every individual.

A Mix of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Reward

It is undeniable that most employees working for NASA must be already motivated to a certain
level considering the organization’s particular characteristics. However, NASA leaders still make
efforts to further motivate their employees, using both extrinsic and intrinsic incentives to boost
their employees’ performance. To go in details, NASA make feedback a major part of their
working process, make employees feel confident (Thompson, 2021), and recognize high-
performers to award them (Pohto, 2023). The emphasize of company’s mission is a notable
method as NASA can make anyone feel important, no matter how minor their job is; for
instance, instead of thinking that they are mopping the floor, a staff at NASA will think that they
are contributing to space exploration (Staff, 2017). With a balanced mix of extrinsic and intrinsic
incentives, NASA empowers and motivates all their employees regardless of positions.

The Future of Work at NASA

As expected from a knowledge-based and scientific organization like NASA, their approach to
talent acquisition is extremely systematic with well-made frameworks. Their comprehensive

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study Future of Work shows their understanding of the ever-changing workforce and working
conditions. Utilizing that knowledge, they came up with the Future of Work framework with four
meta-forces: Mission, People, Technology, and Space (Skytland, The Four Meta Forces –
Mission, People, Technology and Place, 2018) and eight themes, aligning with the intersections
of the major forces (Skytland, The Future of Work Framework, 2018) (Appendix 2). They
consider many factors when hiring new people, not solely technical ability, but also the dynamics
that the employees will give. They also try to be adaptive as new forms of employment arise and
the talent pools shifts by being flexible with their talent acquisition model and restructuring work
to fit the talent pool (Skytland, Future of Work Theme 2: Redefining Talend, 2018). NASA
approaches talent, like many other aspects in management there, with a long-term vision and
discreet research, which show their high regard for human capital.

Analyzing and Evaluating HRM at NASA

The things that stand out the most in NASA’s HRM are knowledge management and employee
engagement. It is no surprise for knowledge management to be a strong point for NASA
considering it is a knowledge-based company with a surreal amount of data to be stored. It is
difficult to measure the success of a KM strategy, although one obvious factor to consider should
be the effectiveness of resources put in (the input) and the quality of the work (output). The
performance of an organization can be enhanced by individuals produce, share, and implement
knowledge (Shannak, Masa'deh, & Akour, 2012). That is exactly what NASA is doing, showing
that they understand the core of knowledge management, which is utilizing the collective
knowledge of the whole organization for each single task or project. Technical aspects can excel
at the expense of employee satisfaction in some companies but is not the case for NASA. The
Employee Engagement and Satisfaction score in NASA is more than 84%, in 2022, making it the
highest of large organizations for the government sector (Partnership for Public Service, 2023).
Another outstanding index is Effective Leadership, being at 84.7%, way above the average for
companies in the same segment (Friedman, 2022). The mentioned aspects are linked to
motivation techniques as factors affecting NASA employees’ motivation expand to supervisor’s
behavior, intrinsic, and extrinsic rewards (Kea, 2008). It is significant for NASA employees to
get day-to-day interactions with their supervisors, get feedback, and feel competent in order to
feel motivated. It is backed up by this research, which state that supervisors being down-to-earth

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and respectful – by allowing employees to speak up, listening to them, acting equally, and so on
– would effectively motivate employees (Guclu & Guney, 2018). NASA has understood that and
has done well in making sure that their employees are heard and valued.

That said, NASA still has its struggles with organizational management. As mentioned in the
culture and leadership part, engineers in NASA do not speak of a potential problem unless
strongly backed by data (Meade, 2023). It shows that they lack confidence in their judgement,
and the culture is encouraging them to do so because data is the key, not experience and
intuition. That could cost them a lot of resources if they follow a project until the end only to find
some minor part not working properly and must go through everything all over again. Another
issue lies within NASA’s recruitment process. Their framework, despite being detailed and well-
crafted, is too abstract and lacks actionability. They set out a lot of criteria and values to consider
but do not have a collective process to attract and retain talent. As the pool of engineers and
science students, especially in aerospace, sizes down remarkably, NASA struggles to find and
attract top employees, and resorts to pouring in money (Light, 2002).

Recommendations

Speculation Margin – Loosening the Culture of Data-driven Decisions

NASA should tackle the issues of employees not speaking up until fully backed by data by
establishing a speculation margin that allows a degree of speculation when making decisions.
While allowing occasional errors enhances productivity, it can also go wrong if people are given
too much freedom to make mistake (Anderson, 2013). The speculation margin will give
employees a flexibility to rely on their experience and conjecture but prevent them from going
too far off the information-based decisions. That way, the engineers would feel more confident
when speaking about their opinion, not being stranded by the absolute data-driven culture.

NASA Science and Engineering Program for the Underrepresented

NASA has aimed to increase inclusivity in workplace, although they are still far from achieving
that goal. The main cause is that they are underrepresented in the science and engineering field
(Light, 2002), making it more difficult for NASA to even find them, let alone attracting them.
Instead of spending more resources to try to attract talent, NASA can use the resources to solve
the root cause of the employee shortage by creating a program for the underrepresented students

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with compatible backgrounds. That way, they can equip their potential employees with the
preferred skillsets and knowledge as well as gain a remarkable advantage when attracting
minority engineers.

Actionable Hiring Strategy – Nurturing Young Talents

NASA is iconic as a pioneer and leader in space travel and discoveries. It is a unique field that is
not for everyone, but the ones who want to be a part of it usually know from the very young age.
However, children’s dream jobs usually do not make it to reality, especially jobs are not
considered “realistic” like astronauts, spacecraft engineer, or scientists. A survey by Deputy
Team (2022) found that only 8% Americans were working their dream job, with the main
obstructions being their dream changing, money, and schooling. NASA can build programs that
support children with a passion in space discoveries financially and educationally to nurture
talent from a young age. Not only will they build their own talent pool for the future, but also
build a great image for social responsibility.

All Level Conference – Engaging Efficiently

NASA put in an immense effort to engage managers with employees, although it can be quite
time-consuming for a supervisor to spend an hour with each of their employee. NASA can
organize informal conferences where individuals of all levels can gather and share their opinions
while acting equally. Each meeting they can have a topic, whether technical or administrative,
about the organization or about space and science in general. The main point is that they give the
opportunities to the employees to participate knowing that they are the same as their supervisors
there.

Partnership in Human Resources

NASA has a lot of existing partnerships with technology and engineering companies, but almost
none, if not none, with administrative partners (NASA, NASA Partnerships, 2023). However, it
can be a good idea to have a professional HR partner to help NASA with the administrative
aspects of their organization since they are more data averse. HR business partners are worth
considering since they are experienced and professional in HR who can tell if the organization’s
HR strategy align with the rest of the business (Indeed Editorial Team, 2022). NASA can be the
leaders in their field, although the best executives are not always the best at organization and

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management. They can learn from HR partners, and then use their knowledge management
system to deliver the management skills to all their high-level supervisors.

III. Conclusion

As the time changes, NASA will have to adapt to keep moving closer to new discoveries. The
immense knowledge that the organization holds is extremely beneficial but can also be a burden
since they must keep developing the systems to store and transfer it. Even if they do maintain the
data forever, they still face the issue of whether their next generation can utilize them as
attracting and retaining talent will likely be their next biggest challenge. Nevertheless, they have
the great advantage of attracting space enthusiasts, especially when combining with excellent
employee engagement. There will be hardships, but if NASA can utilize their information and
frameworks, they can surely ‘reach for the moon.’

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IV. References
Anderson, A. R. (2013, April 17). Good Employees Make Mistakes. Great Leaders Allow Them To. Forbes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyanderson/2013/04/17/good-employees-make-mistakes-
great-leaders-allow-them-to/?sh=73959fce126a

Becerra-Fernandez, I., & Sabherwal, R. (2005). Knowledge management at NASA Kennedy Space Centre.
International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 159-170. 10.1504/IJKL.2005.006257

Fox, T. (2013, July 26). The NASA approach to keeping employees engaged. The Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2013/07/26/the-nasa-approach-to-
keeping-employees-engaged/

Friedman, D. (2022, August 8). NASA gets the gold trophy again for Best Places to Work, but it hasn’t
always been that way. Federal News Network. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/federal-
report/2022/08/nasa-gets-the-gold-trophy-again-for-best-places-to-work-but-it-hasnt-always-
been-that-way/#:~:text=Similar%20to%20many%20agencies%2C%20NASA's,them%20on%2C
%E2%80%9D%20Buchholz%20said

Guclu, H., & Guney, S. (2018). The Effect of the Motivation Techniques Used by Managers to Increase
the Productivity of their Workers and an Application. Business Management Dynamics, 7(7), 1-
18. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2134024058?fromopenview=true&pq-
origsite=gscholar

Indeed Editorial Team. (2022, December 12). What Is an HR Business Partner? (And How To Become
One). Indeed. https://au.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/what-is-an-hr-business-
partner#:~:text=An%20HR%20business%20partner%20is,the%20company's%20internal%20HR
%20department.

Kea, H. E. (2008). How Are NASA Engineers Motivated? An Analysis of Factors that Influence NASA
Goddard Engineers’ Level of Motivation Influence NASA Goddard Engineers’ Level of Motivation.
Student & Alumni Scholarship, including Dissertations & Theses.
https://aura.antioch.edu/etds/669?utm_source=aura.antioch.edu%2Fetds
%2F669&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages

Light, P. C. (2002, September 1). Earth to NASA. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/earth-

to-nasa/

McCurdy, H. E. (1992). NASA's Organizational Culture. Public Administration Review, 189-192.

https://doi.org/10.2307/976474
Meade, P. (2023, March 2). Inside NASA’s approach to revitalizing and transforming organizational
culture. (E. Mixson, Interviewer)

NASA. (2018, April). Developing a Knowledge Management (KM) Plan. NASA. https://appel.nasa.gov/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/Developing-a-KM-Plan_V3.pdf

NASA. (2023). NASA Partnerships. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/partnerships/

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Partnership for Public Service. (2023, March). Agency Performance Dashboard: National Aeronautics and
Space Administration. https://ourpublicservice.org/performance-measures/agency-
performance-dashboard/profile/NASA/

Pohto, Z. J. (2023, October 4). Human Resources. NASA.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/nssc/human-resources/#section-8

Rogers, E. W. (2023). The Knowledge Management Journey. NASA.

https://appel.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/51i_km_journey.pdf

Shannak, R. O., Masa'deh, R. M., & Akour, “. A. (2012). KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
BUILDING: LITERATURE REVIEW. European Scientific Journal. 8, 143-168.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257922672_Knowledge_Management_Strategy_Buil
ding_Literature_Review

Skytland, N. (2018, December 3). Future of Work Theme 2: Redefining Talend. NASA.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/futureofwork/2018/12/03/future-of-work-theme-2-redefining-talent/

Skytland, N. (2018, October 16). The Four Meta Forces – Mission, People, Technology and Place. NASA.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/futureofwork/2018/10/16/the-four-meta-forces-mission-people-
technology-and-place/

Skytland, N. (2018, November 15). The Future of Work Framework. NASA.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/futureofwork/2018/11/15/the-future-of-work-framework/

Staff, K. a. (2017, March 16). Meaningful Work: What Leaders Can Learn from NASA and the Space Race.
Knowledge at Wharton. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what-leaders-can-learn-
from-nasa/

Team, D. (2022, August 26). Dream Job vs. Reality: An Analysis. Deputy.
https://www.deputy.com/au/blog/dream-job-vs-reality

Thompson, R. (2021, November 23). At NASA, Open And Trusted Leadership Is As Important As Technical
Prowess. (J. McKendrick, Interviewer)

V. Appendices

Appendix 1: The three major policies regarding knowledge management at NASA, covering
both technical and administrative aspects.

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Appendix 2: Eight themes of the Future of Work framework

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