ABSTRACT
Management scholars increasingly focus on how employee-organization relationships (EOR) influence voluntary employee turnover. Historically, turnover researchers examined employees’ experiences with their proximal work environment to identify causes impelling them to quit, such as dissatisfying tasks or poor leader-member exchanges (Hom & Griffeth, 1995). During the 1990s, the advent of strategic human resources (Butler & Ferris, 1991; Gomez-Mejia & Balkin, 1992) and radical restructuring of employment relationships (Batt, Colvin, & Keefe, 2002; Cappelli, 2000; Tsui, Pearce, Porter, & Hite, 1995) initiated scholarly inquiry into different EOR forms (Baron & Kreps, 1999). As a consequence, many organizational scientists are documenting how firm-level EORs affect aggregate-level turnover rates (Arthur, 1984; Huselid, 1995), going beyond traditional preoccupation with individual-level antecedents (Griffeth, Hom, & Gaertner, 2000). This escalating avenue of turnover research concludes that certain EOR forms most deter turnover, such as “high-performance” (Huselid, 1995) or “mutual investment” EORs (whereby employees offer bountiful inducements but expect high and broad staff contributions) (Arthur, 1984; Huselid, 1995; Tsui, Pearce, Porter, & Tripoli, 1997). Recently, this research stream investigated mechanisms mediating or moderating EOR effects on attrition or generalized EOR effects across different industries, cultures, and types of turnover (Gutherie, 2001; Hausknecht & Trevor, 2010; Hom et al., 2009; Shaw, Dineen, Fang, & Vellella, 2009; Yalabik, Chen, Lawler, & Kim, 2008). A recent meta-analysis based on 6,105 firms thus estimated a 0.12 correlation between high-performance human resources systems and workforce retention (Combs, Liu, Hall, & Ketchen, 2006).
