Employee-Organization Relationships: Their Impact on Push-and-Pull Forces for Staying and Leaving

Management scholars increasingly focus on how employee-organization relationships (EOR) in uence voluntary employee turnover. Historically, turnover researchers examined employees’ experiences with their proximal work environment to identify causes impelling them to quit, such as dissatisfying tasks or poor leader-member exchanges (Hom & Gri eth, 1995). During the 1990s, the advent of strategic human resources (Butler & Ferris, 1991; Gomez-Mejia & Balkin, 1992) and radical restructuring of employment relationships (Batt, Colvin, & Keefe, 2002; Cappelli, 2000; Tsui, Pearce, Porter, & Hite, 1995) initiated scholarly inquiry into di erent EOR forms (Baron & Kreps, 1999). As a consequence, many organizational scientists are documenting how rmlevel EORs affect aggregate-level turnover rates (Arthur, 1984; Huselid, 1995), going beyond traditional preoccupation with individual-level antecedents (Gri eth, Hom, & Gaertner, 2000). is escalating avenue of turnover research concludes that certain EOR forms most deter turnover, such as “high-performance” (Huselid, 1995) or “mutual investment” EORs (whereby employees o er bountiful inducements but expect high and broad sta contributions) (Arthur, 1984; Huselid, 1995; Tsui, Pearce, Porter, & Tripoli, 1997). Recently, this research stream investigated mechanisms mediating or moderating EOR e ects on attrition or generalized EOR e ects across di erent industries, cultures, and types of turnover (Gutherie, 2001; Hausknecht & Trevor, 2010; Hom et al., 2009; Shaw, Dineen, Fang, & Vellella, 2009; Yalabik, Chen, Lawler, & Kim, 2008). A recent meta-analysis based on 6, 105 rms thus estimated a 0.12 correlation between high-performance human resources systems and workforce retention (Combs, Liu, Hall, & Ketchen, 2006).