Who stays and who leaves? Social dynamics surrounding employee turnover

[摘要] My dissertation consists of two essays that examine employee turnover as an independent and a dependent variable. In my first essay I examine the relationship between job-related attitudes, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and employee turnover behavior. In a sample of over 6,000 teachers in 200 public elementary schools, I found significant variability across employee and organizational characteristics in the strength of the relationship between job attitude ratings and turnover. I attribute this variability to two sources: (a) systematic differences in attitude thresholds, i.e. the minimum acceptable level of a job attitude necessary to remain with the organization; and (b) systematic response biases in attitude ratings. I develop a model to determine which characteristics relate to significant differences in attitude thresholds and/or response biasing factors and found that both individual and organizational attributes are distinguishing factors. In my second essay I present findings from three inter-related studies investigating human and social capital as mechanisms that may determine whether and why employee retention is associated with organizational performance. In a sample of public schools I found a linear relationship between employee retention and organizational performance. Further, this positive association is fully mediated by human capital and partially mediated by social capital. In addition, I examined human and social capital at the individual level of employees who remain with the organization versus those who leave. I found that organizational performance suffers most when the employees who leave have high levels of both human and social capital. Finally, I distinguished human and social capital losses based on their specificity: organization-specific versus task-specific. As predicted, the losses of task-specific human and social capital were more deleterious to organizational performance than the losses of organization-specific forms of capital.

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh

[效力级别] human capital