Mitigating Turnover Intentions: Are All IT Workers Warriors?

Abstract

The current study is a conceptual replication of Ahuja, Chudoba, Kacmar, McKnight, and George’s (2007) model of the proximal and distal antecedents of the turnover intentions of information technology (IT) professionals. Whereas the original study focused on ‘IT Road Warriors’, those that spend most of their work life away from home; we applied the original study’s hypotheses and model to the more general context of IT professionals. Results from a sample of 301 IT professionals housed in an on-site internal IT department were mixed. Consistent with Ahuja et al. (2007), the relationships between exhaustion, organizational commitment, and turnover intention were supported. Also, the influence of work-family conflict on exhaustion, but not organizational commitment, was confirmed. In contrast to Ahuja et al. (2007), the replication study found that fairness of rewards was much more important to in-house IT professionals than autonomy. Future research should investigate the boundaries of Ahuja et al.’s (2007) model of turnover intention for various sub-populations within the IT profession, such as system administrators, contract workers, and perhaps CIOs. Researchers may also want to explore factors outside the current model that may impact the turnover intention of IT professionals such as organizational and professional identity and boundary spanning.