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An Acrobat version of the full-text of James L. Price, "The development of a
causal model of voluntary turnover," in Innovative Theory and Empirical
Research of Employee Turnover, ed. Rodger Griffeth, ch. 1, is available at
the lower scrolling gray bar at:
http://www.infoagepub.com/
or
http://www.infoagepub.com/products/product3/Chapter1.pdf

This sample is meant to entice you to get the full book (which is great):
http://www.infoagepub.com/products/product3/griffethcombo.pdf

Cybercollegially,
Charles Wankel
St. John's University, New York

This is interesting work on voluntary turnover.
I think you would need, though, to add a mechanism missed out of many
studies of 'causality'. Staff turnover, like many other phenomena of
interest, is a behavioural event, triggered by state of mind. And state
of mind is not instantly 'caused' by any single factor or collection of
factors. Instead it accumulates over what can be quite long periods of
time. This has a number of implications ...
- the decision to resign gets triggered when such a collection of
influences build up sufficient dissatisfaction to push us 'over the
edge' [just as we may put up with poor service for some time before
finally becoming so annoyed that we stop using a particular airline,
restaurant, etc]
- consequently, we can only understand when that trigger point is being
reached by understanding the entire history of events that have built up
this dissatisfaction
- at the same time, people can't remember everything or build up mental
energy on any issue indefinitely, so tend to 'forgive and forget',
- so drivers of dissatisfaction can continue for long periods without
actually triggering resignation, provided they are not too severe - we
have irritated staff, but not so irritated that they leave
- this combination of accumulation and depletion can cause
discontinuities - everything seems fine until some perhaps-trivial event
provides the final straw
- provided that the negative stimulus is not repeated or continuous,
then, the dissatisfaction will deplete (unfortunately, such negative
stimuli may well be continued)
- this unfortunately undermines efforts to find causal explanations from
correlation studies ... if state of mind reflects an entire historical
stream of events and conditions, then the resignation at this moment
cannot be 'caused' by any single measure at this same moment (unless
that measure has itself been relatively continuous over some substantial
history)
- since many factors may contribute to the build up of dissatisfaction,
over time, it is equally difficult to ascribe the resignation event to
any arithmetical mix of these factors
The math that handles accumulation and depletion of 'asset stocks' such
as dissatisfaction is integral calculus, and the practical method for
modelling the process is system dynamics. The current favoured reference
work on this approach is Sterman J, 'Business Dynamics', McGraw-Hill.
Like most books on system dynamics this takes the start-point that
feedback processes contain the big explanations for behaviour of social
systems, but it nevertheless has a rock-solid foundation in dealing
properly with stock-accumulation.
My own take on the topic is that much can be explained, and managed, by
looking just at accumulation and depletion of factors like job
satisfaction
I can provide more leads if anyone is interested.
Kim Warren


-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Wankel [mailto:cxx@bellatlantic.net]
Sent: 13 February 2004 14:36
To: MG-ED-DV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
Subject: The development of a causal model of voluntary turnover

An Acrobat version of the full-text of James L. Price, "The development
of a
causal model of voluntary turnover," in Innovative Theory and Empirical
Research of Employee Turnover, ed. Rodger Griffeth, ch. 1, is available
at
the lower scrolling gray bar at:
http://www.infoagepub.com/
or
http://www.infoagepub.com/products/product3/Chapter1.pdf

This sample is meant to entice you to get the full book (which is
great):
http://www.infoagepub.com/products/product3/griffethcombo.pdf

Cybercollegially,
Charles Wankel
St. John's University, New York

From: SungoldEnterpris@aol.com [mailto:SungoldEnterpris@aol.com]

Kim,

Beautiful analysis. Citations aside from the one you gave?

Joe Champoux

Joseph E. Champoux, Ph.D.
Regents' Professor of Management
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Kim writes in part:

> This is interesting work on voluntary turnover.
> I think you would need, though, to add a mechanism missed out of many
> studies of 'causality'. Staff turnover, like many other phenomena of
> interest, is a behavioural event, triggered by state of mind. And state
> of mind is not instantly 'caused' by any single factor or collection of
> factors. Instead it accumulates over what can be quite long periods of
> time.

Some years ago I had the chance to look, from a systems point of view, at a
similar situation within the central IT division of 3M Company. I worked
with a group of mostly mid-level managers. They came together because the
'presenting symptom' was an increase in turnover. After an hour an a half
of focus on that variable, they concluded that it was diverting their
attention from the more powerful variable: Employee Satisfaction.

In the ultra-simplficed version, it turns out that to reduce your voluntary
turnover you have two choices. Affect the Marketplace Demand or affect the
Employee Satisfaction. Working on the former goes like this: visit the
other employers in town and plead with them to treat their people badly and
pay them poorly so that your turnover will go down. Doesn't seem too
promising! The other choice was to work on Employee Satisfaction. And
that opens a whole realm of options. If someone were truly interested, I
could send a pdf file with causal loop diagram reflecting that group's
thinking ...

Michael A

Michael Ayers
mbayers@earthlink.net <=> www.TheCommonwealthPractice.com
-> Sometimes the right question is:
Are we asking the right question? <-

From The Clerk's Tale: Gladly would he learn and gladly teach ...