Staying or Leaving? How Job Satisfaction, Embeddedness and Antecedents Predict Turnover Intentions of Software Professionals
🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates the formation mechanisms underlying voluntary turnover intention among software professionals. Drawing on geographically diverse cross-sectional survey data, we develop a partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) framework that integrates psychological and organizational constructs, explicitly distinguishing reflective from formative measurement models. We systematically examine direct and indirect pathways linking antecedents—job quality, personality traits, technological attitude, and perceived organizational justice—to mediators—job satisfaction, job embeddedness, and work–life balance—and ultimately to turnover intention. Results indicate that both job satisfaction and job embeddedness significantly and negatively predict turnover intention; work–life balance exerts an indirect effect on turnover intention via job satisfaction; and perceived organizational justice exhibits the strongest positive effect on job embeddedness. The study advances theory by elucidating a multi-level causal chain—from distal antecedents through proximal mediators to retention decisions—offering empirically grounded insights for enhancing software talent retention.
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📝 Abstract
Context: Voluntary turnover is common in the software industry, increasing recruitment and onboarding costs and the risk of losing organizational and tacit knowledge. Objective: This study investigates how job satisfaction, work-life balance, job embeddedness, and their antecedents, including job quality, personality traits, attitudes toward technical and sociotechnical infrastructure, and perceptions of organizational justice, relate to software professionals' turnover intentions. Method: We conducted a geographically diverse cross-sectional survey of software professionals (N = 224) and analyzed the data using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Our model includes both reflective and formative constructs and tests 15 hypotheses grounded in occupational psychology and software engineering literature. Results: Job satisfaction and embeddedness were significantly negatively associated with software professionals' turnover intentions, while work-life balance showed no direct effect. The strongest antecedents for job satisfaction were work-life balance and job quality, while organizational justice was the strongest predictor of job embeddedness. Discussion: The resulting PLS-SEM model has considerably higher explanatory power for key outcome variables than previous work conducted in the software development context, highlighting the importance of both psychological (e.g., job satisfaction, job embeddedness) and organizational (e.g., organizational justice, job quality) factors in understanding turnover intentions of software professionals. Our results imply that improving job satisfaction and job embeddedness is the key to retaining software professionals. In turn, enhancing job quality, supporting work-life balance, and ensuring high organizational justice can improve job satisfaction and embeddedness, indirectly reducing turnover intentions.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Investigates factors influencing software professionals' turnover intentions
Examines job satisfaction, embeddedness, and organizational justice effects
Aims to reduce turnover by improving job quality and work-life balance
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
PLS-SEM modeling with reflective and formative constructs
Integrating psychological and organizational factors in analysis
Focusing on job satisfaction and embeddedness as key mediators
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2024-03-09arXiv.orgCitations: 0
