My dissertation consists of two essays that examine employee turnover as an independent and a dependent variable. In my first essay I examine the relationship between job-related attitudes, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and employee turnover behavior. In a sample of over 6,000 teachers in 200 public elementary schools, I found significant variability across employee and organizational characteristics in the strength of the relationship between job attitude ratings and turnover. I attribute this variability to two sources: (a) systematic differences in attitude thresholds, i.e. the minimum acceptable level of a job attitude necessary to remain with the organization; and (b) systematic response biases in attitude ratings. I develop a model to determine which characteristics relate to significant differences in attitude thresholds and/or response biasing factors and found that both individual and organizational attributes are distinguishing factors.
In my second essay I present findings from three inter-related studies investigating human and social capital as mechanisms that may determine whether and why employee retention is associated with organizational performance. In a sample of public schools I found a linear relationship between employee retention and organizational performance. Further, this positive association is fully mediated by human capital and partially mediated by social capital. In addition, I examined human and social capital at the individual level of employees who remain with the organization versus those who leave. I found that organizational performance suffers most when the employees who leave have high levels of both human and social capital. Finally, I distinguished human and social capital losses based on their specificity: organization-specific versus task-specific. As predicted, the losses of task-specific human and social capital were more deleterious to organizational performance than the losses of organization-specific forms of capital.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-08272008-130405 |
| Date | 29 September 2008 |
| Creators | Shevchuk, Iryna |
| Contributors | Carrie R. Leana, Vikas Mittal, Richard L. Moreland, Denise M. Rousseau, Marick F. Masters |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08272008-130405/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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