Perceived obsolescence, organizational embeddedness, and turnover of it workers: an empirical study

  • Authors:

  • Xiaoni Zhang;Sherry D. Ryan;Victor R. Prybutok;Leon Kappelman

  • Affiliations:

  • Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, KY, USA;College of Business, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA;University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA;College of Business, University of North Texas, Denton, USA

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGMIS Database
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Technical skill currency is especially important to IT professionals, yet past research has not integrated perceived obsolescence into the nomological net with organizational embeddedness when investigating IT workers' turnover intentions. Responding to a call for additional research on IT worker turnover we utilize a sample of 1,777 IT workers in a very large and complex IT organization and find that organizational embeddedness explains significant incremental variance beyond the traditional turnover model. The findings presented here show that organizational embeddedness is an essential mediator between perceived skill obsolescence and IT voluntary turnover. Our data also show that the effect of perceived obsolescence on embeddedness is moderated by age. This work provides organizations with insights on why employees choose to stay in an organization, or leave it. We find that both fit and sacrifice dimensions of embeddedness mediate the relationship between perceived skill obsolescence and turnover intention, but that only the sacrifice dimension is a full mediator. These findings suggest that turnover intention is a multivariate issue and that future IT turnover research needs to include other variables such as perceived obsolescence and age. Furthermore there is a need for future research on the role of the specific dimensions of embeddedness. We suggest strategies to reduce voluntary turnover based on the predictive variables in the research model.