DOI

https://doi.org/10.25772/2PGA-FN74

Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0001-8487-6648

Defense Date

2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Business

First Advisor

Michael McDaniel

Second Advisor

Frank Bosco

Third Advisor

Christopher Reina

Fourth Advisor

Benson Wier

Abstract

Turnover is one of the most important phenomena for management scholars and practitioners. Yet, researchers and practitioners are often frustrated by their inability to accurately predict why individuals leave their jobs. This should be worrisome given that total replacement costs can exceed 100% of an employee’s salary (Cascio, 2006) and can represent up to 40% of a firm’s pre-tax income (Allen, 2008). Motivated by these concerns, the purpose of this study was to assess the predictive validity of commonly-investigated correlates and, by extension, conceptualizations of employee turnover using a large-scale database of scientific findings. Results indicate that job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and embeddedness (e.g., person-job fit, person-organization fit) may be the most valid proximal predictors of turnover intention. Results for a tripartite analysis of the potential empirical redundancy between job satisfaction and organizational commitment when predicting turnover intention align well with previous research on this topic and generally suggest that the two constructs may be empirically indistinguishable in the turnover context. Taken together, this study has important implications for the turnover and sensitivity analysis literatures. With regard to the sensitivity analysis literature, this study demonstrates the application of a sensitivity analysis for relative importance weights in the meta-analytic context. This new method takes into account variance around the meta-analytic mean effect size estimate when imputing relative importance weights and may be adapted to other correlation matrix-based techniques (i.e., structural equation modeling) that are often used to test theory.

Rights

© James G. Field

Is Part Of

VCU University Archives

Is Part Of

VCU Theses and Dissertations

Date of Submission

5-2-2017

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