Preventing Voluntary Turnover

Preventing Voluntary Turnover

Preventing voluntary turnover is important to the success of an organization. Staff turnover is expensive for companies, a cost no employer willingly wants to absorb. There are direct costs such as advertising, interviewing and training and indirect costs such as low morale and disruption of customer care or final product quality (Ziemba, 2004, 44). In a day when tight budgets, time limitations, and customer satisfaction are important to the bottom line, identifying why people leave there job is important, so is determining why they stay.

There are many reasons for employee turnover. Nursing has experiences some of the largest turnover rates; their sheer importance in the healthcare market can result in potential catastrophic results for health care providers (Murrow & Nowak, 2005, 1). Although the shortage of healthcare workers may appear an extreme example; all employee turnover is extreme, to the bottom line. The loss of health care workers could result in the loss of life, the loss of service industry or industrial workers could be a loss of revenue. All industries face turnover that could be catastrophic the livelihood of their business, in the form of lost profits.

Identifying why employee turnover is occurring is the key to diminishing or eliminating these financial losses. One key way to identify why people leave a company; is reversely determined by answering, how to avoid or predict voluntary turnover? Why people stay: The article Why People Stay: Using Job Embeddedness to Predict Voluntary Turnover is a statistical research analysis that takes regressions analysis of voluntary turnover among Grocery Works and Hospital Works. They present to the reader the purpose of their article which is to "present a new construct called job embeddedness," they believe this is the "key to why people stay on their jobs" (Murrow & Nowak, 2005, 1011).

In there analysis the researchers review literature that exists in regard to organizational attachment, job embeddedness, and how this embeddedness theory is different and yet similar to the theory of voluntary turnover ideas presented by March and Simon (1958). Lastly, they discuss how managers and employers can manipulate embeddedness and influence employee turnover.

Historically human resource managers have determined; if an employee becomes dissatisfied with their job through

pay, challenges, promotional opportunities, or co-worker dissatisfaction and excreta; they will seek alternatives. Employees will traditionally compare the alternative of changing jobs using an expected-value decision process (Mobley, 1977). The most investigated research, with this theory, comes in the area of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The other areas researched are non-work factors and precipitating events. These all have correlative values to why people choose to leave their organization (Mitchell, Holtom, Thomas, Sablynski, & Erez, 2001, 1107).

The article particularly focused it research on a new construct called job embeddedness. This "represents a broad constellation of influences on employee retention." There are two investigative ideas that assist the researches in coming to their conclusions; these are the field and figures theory developed by Lewin in 1951. The theories are explained in this fashion by the researches to describe job embeddedness:

Embedded Theory: "... these are images used in psychological test, are immersed in their backgrounds. Attached to their backgrounds and hard to separate from them, embedded figures become part of the surroundings."

Field Theory: "the idea that people have a perceptual life space in which the aspects of their lives are represented and connected. These connections can be few or many and close of distant."

The critical aspects of this theory lies in the idea that people like to have links or connections with others, their job "works for them", and the ease in which the links or relationships can be broken. This determines the job embededdness factor.

The hypothesis of this survey study focused on the totality of embedding forces that keep a person on the job, rather than the negative aspects that tempt an employee to leave a job (Mitchell, Holtom, Thomas, Sablynski, & Erez, 2001, 1108). Their research was in assessing personal characteristics, satisfaction for job, how committed the individual was with the organization, job search ability, perceived alternatives, and job embeddedness. Surveys were distributed to approximately 1,200 employees, randomly in 1998. There were 464 surveys