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1. Introduction
Building and maintaining a stable, productive, collaborative and high-quality workforce is a primary concern of the majority of corporate officers, as success in this area tends to be a critical contributing factor to the overall prosperity of the firm (Babington, 1993, for a survey of relevant issues). Inevitably, all firms will experience employee attrition. Involuntary attrition is often the result of profitability and performance pressures, department or business line obsolescence and mergers and acquisitions, among other factors (Datta et al., 2009; Andries and Jaspet, 2002; O’Shaughnessy and Flanagan, 1998). In contrast, voluntary attrition is driven predominately by employee concerns (Moninder et al., 2012). Such considerations may focus around, but are not limited to, managerial direction, compensation and benefits, firm culture, firm desirability and location and promotion potential as well as non-firm specific motivations, for example, medical conditions or retirement.
A central objective of the majority of human resource departments is to understand the root causes behind voluntary employee attrition and develop an associated mitigation strategy. Effectively navigating such issues generally results in explicit positive monetary effects stemming from increased firm revenue and cost reductions manifested through the work product of highly performant retained employees. In addition, identifying and resolving issues found to be common to employee attrition often implicitly enhances firm culture and workplace desirably, which in turn enables the recruitment of higher quality staff who further improve retention, firm operation and business practices (Cook and Ferris, 1986; Freeman, 1994). The compounding effect of the employee attrition feedback loop on overall firm success or failure provides, in our view, the essential motive to investigate the issue.
Traditionally, employee attrition- and retention-related questions tend to be examined by qualitative and anecdotal measures. Specifically, human resources staff typically conducts exit interviews after an employee provides a resignation notice to ascertain the motivations behind the decision to leave (Giacalone and Duhon, 1991). Although these conversations may be direct and candid, that is, in the event an employee is leaving for a significantly more senior role or needs to change their geographic location for family-related purposes, in actuality, human resource staff encounters considerable difficulty in discerning the employee’s actual motivation. These circumstances impact the employee attrition data aggregation and quality assurance process by making it...