Staff turnover is a concern almost everywhere as the demand for talent begins to outstrips the supply. However, turnover in R&D is particularly damaging because of the disruption to projects and because technical and scientific researchers are hard to...
Staff turnover is a concern almost everywhere as the demand for talent begins to outstrips the supply. However, turnover in R&D is particularly damaging because of the disruption to projects and because technical and scientific researchers are hard to replace. Standard estimates of turnover costs range from one time to seven times annual salary. A survey of GRI(Government Research Institute) in Korea revealed that turnover rate was 11.5% in 1998, 7.6% in 1999, and 10.9% in 2000. Also turnover intention is too high according to the survey of the Science and Technology Labor Union in 2001(about 78% researchers considering turnover).
March & Simon(1958) identified the main antecedents to voluntary turnover, in particular they proposed that turnover results from the individual's perceptions about the desirability and ease of movement. Over time, however, the perceived desirability of movement has been equated essentially with job satisfaction alone, and the perceived ease of movement has been equated essentially with the number of perceived job alternatives. These two constructs, satisfaction and alternatives, serve as the major conceptual underpinning for much of the literature on turnover.
But turnover is a complex process whereby individuals assess their feelings, personal situation, and work environment and, over time, make decisions about staying or leaving on organization. The existing models of employee turnover are too simple, that is, leaving an organization can take place in many different ways. One of the major precipitating events for employee turnover is the shock to the system-an event that prompts an individual to evaluate his current and perhaps other jobs. In most cases, employees make decisions about staying with or leaving an organization based on a fit or compatability criterion, rather than on maximizing their subjective expected utilities.
This research focus is on why and how people leave their jobs. There were many different ways or paths that people used to leave their jobs. I used the Unfolding Model, made by Lee & Mitchell(1994). This Model describes four paths which people take when they leave a job and was validated by several samples, like a nurses, accountants, bank employees. I made a research model based on the Unfolding model and Korean specific situations through the intensive interview and literature review.
The sample consisted of two kinds of researchers from GRI, one is actual turnover research scientist(they already left from GRI, 92 employees), the other have worked as a researchers in GRI who have turnover intention(346 employees). Research method was used by the LIZREL, T-test, Cross-stab and so on. The major findings of this study are summarized as follows. First, shock was important factor to determine the turnover decision process and shock influenced on the turnover. Second, there were different kind of path in the process of turnover like a Unfolding Model, but it's content is not same to the Lee & Mitchell's Unfolding Model. Third, image violation is correlated with low job satisfaction and opportunity of movement is influenced on the alternative search. Fourth, job embeddedness is contribute to the decrease of employee turnover.
Major contributions of this study are the empirical test of Unfolding model and job embeddedness and find a different path of turnover, contrary to the western turnover process. I proposed the Korean specific unfolding model and it is need to replicate this Korean model to other samples and have to generalized Korean unfolding model.