Dr. Alex Rubenstein article accepted for publication in Personnel Psychology

For release:  February 9, 2017

Dr. Alex Rubenstein, assistant professor in the Department of Management, recently had his article accepted for publication in Personnel Psychology. The article is entitled "Surveying the forest: A meta-analysis, moderator investigation, and future-oriented discussion of the antecedents of voluntary employee turnover." Dr. Rubenstein co-authored the article with Dr. Marion Eberly, University of Washington, Tacoma, Dr. Thomas Lee, University of Washington, Seattle, and Dr. Terence Mitchell, University of Washington, Seattle.

Recent narrative reviews advise that it is timely to assess the progress made in research on voluntary employee turnover in order to guide future work. To provide this assessment, the authors employed a three-step approach. First, they conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of turnover predictors, updating existing effect sizes and examining multiple new antecedents. Second, guided by theory, they developed and tested a set of substantive moderators, considering factors that might exacerbate or mitigate zero-order meta-analytic effects. Third, they examined the holistic pattern of results in order to highlight the most pressing needs for future turnover research. The results of Step 1 revealed multiple newer predictors and updated effect sizes of more traditional predictors, which have received substantially greater study. The results of Step 2 provided insight into the context-dependent nature of many antecedent-turnover relationships. In Step 3, their discussion takes a birds-eye view of the turnover "forest" and considers the theoretical and practical implications of the results. The authors offer several research recommendations that break from the traditional turnover paradigm, as a means of guiding future study.