The Influence of Social Context on Turnover Decisions of IT Professionals

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Manuel Wiesche
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451158720

A prominent research topic in Information Systems (Wirtschaftsinformatik) research is the attraction, motivation, and retention of IT professionals. These IT professionals, their tasks and the IT job market exhibit specific characteristics that affect IT professional’s turnover behavior. Turnover of IT professionals poses many problems for organizations as it is difficult to find replacements because of high demand in IT labor markets. It further creates high costs for IT organizations, related not only to the direct costs of recruiting and training, but also through indirect costs associated with the disruption of organizational processes. Thus, turnover is a continuous topic in IT workforce research and job and organizational related reasons have been explored. However, IT research has rarely connected the social context of IT work to the workplace behavior of IT professionals. The research project thus seeks to answer the question of how social context influences the turnover behavior of IT professions. In preparation for this study, we build a model drawing on Social Comparison Theory (SCT) that predicts the impact of social context on turnover behavior of IT professionals. This research project uses an explanatory mixed-methods design to combine perceptual aspects of the turnover process with actual turnover behavior. The mixed-methods approach first tests the conceptual model using a longitudinal data set of an organizational network. We will calculate the probability of transmitting turnover information in the social network based on the relationships between IT professionals and conduct survival analysis to predict the probability of IT professional turnover based on social comparison. The second step of the mixed-methods design is an exploratory approach to explore contextual variables and provide a process perspective. Only with this mixed-method design, a holistic perspective on turnover of IT professionals can be offered. With this research project we seek to examine the social context as a powerful influence on the turnover behavior of IT professionals that magnifies the impact of job options. This research further seeks to explain how similarity in domain-specific attributes shapes the turnover behavior of IT professionals and to lay a foundation for conceptualizing how social comparison leads to turnover among groups of IT professionals.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants