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Title: Distinct Voluntary Turnover Paths and Determinants: A Survival Analysis with a Competing Risks Approach
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Lee, Tae Heon
Distinct Voluntary Turnover Paths and Determinants: A Survival Analysis with a Competing Risks Approach
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2004. DAI-A 65/08, p. 3060, Feb 2005
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): Job Turnover; Labor Economics; Modeling; Quits

Employees voluntarily leave their current jobs for a variety of reasons. The failure to explicitly distinguish different turnover processes or paths may produce misleading empirical results, which may have greatly contributed to the prevalence of multiple competing turnover models and equivocal empirical results in the previous literature. This study attempted to address this lack of comprehensive conceptual and empirical research on distinct turnover processes by empirically examining whether different types of voluntary turnover indeed represented statistically distinct processes. Using a sample from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, voluntary leavers were classified into the five different groups according to their specific reasons for turnover (i.e., quit to take another job; quit to look for a job; quit to take an unsolicited job offer; quit for family-related reasons; quit for other reasons). This study employed a survival analysis with a competing risks approach to compare these five groups of voluntary leavers in terms of the differential effects of diverse explanatory variables on voluntary turnover. The results showed that the effects of the explanatory variables on voluntary turnover varied across the five different groups of voluntary leavers. In addition, the results of the formal statistical tests of the equality of the parameters or coefficients across various comparison groups further confirmed that the five different types of voluntary turnover were statistically distinguishable. The results of this study provided strong evidence against the previous research practice of applying a particular turnover model (e.g., a deliberate turnover process based on an economically rational decision rule) indiscriminately to all voluntary leavers. The results of this study also call for future research to further identify and define distinct voluntary turnover processes. In sum, this study demonstrated that the integration of recent conceptual and methodological developments (i.e., the unfolding model and survival analysis) can open up a new promising avenue to the future turnover research.
Bibliography Citation
Lee, Tae Heon. Distinct Voluntary Turnover Paths and Determinants: A Survival Analysis with a Competing Risks Approach. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2004. DAI-A 65/08, p. 3060, Feb 2005.