WHAT TRIGGERS EMPLOYEE TURNOVER?

 

Employee turnover issues have always been a critical issue for management for long. An employee turnover gives greater loss to an organization than any other organizational factor. That is why companies are always striving hard to make employee retention one of their top priorities.

Career Transitions

Turnover can be categorized more precisely into the term “career transition”. This career transition is activated within employees when they feel their identity has been challenged, ignored, or treated undistinguishable. It is a process or period of the simultaneous ending of a previous relationship with certain role identities and the beginning of a working relationship with new work roles. Both the personal life and organizational factors are responsible for triggering the intention to transition a career in a worker.  

 

Kinds of Career Transitions

Latack (1984), proposed three forms of career transition:

(a) Intra-organizational transition (e.g., moving oneself from one division to another within the same organization),

(b) Inter-organizational transition (e.g., moving oneself from one organization to another), and

(c) Inter-professional transition (e.g., occupation change).

 

Career transitions or career changes triggered by factors within organizations include the transitions in task, position, and occupation (Heppner et al., 1998). A change in task is defined as a shift from one set of tasks to another within the same job type and same workplace, whereas a change in position is considered as a shift in job type with the same employer or to a different organization. Nevertheless, a change in occupation means transitioning from one profession to another or engaging in entrepreneurship.

 Career Transition Intentions

Any kind of career transition or turnover is used as a strategy to escape the existing situation. Perceptions are the depiction of human behavior and roles. Perceptions built upon the grounds of task significance in a workplace also determine career transition intentions. The turnover intention is associated with predictors like organizational culture, job demands, independence, identity threat, work effort, and attitudes. It is the extent to which an employee plans to leave his current workplace. The turnover intention just begins before the actual turnover takes place. Therefore, there is a strong need to identify those turnover intentions as soon as possible and devise appropriate strategies to counter those intentions.

 

My next articles are going to reveal in detail the impact of role stressors on career transition intentions and also the effect of work engagement on career transition intentions.