Challenging conventional wisdom about employee turnover: Revelations from corporate America

We report findings from a consortium of 20 large corporations that share quit statistics about their professional workforce (numbering 475,458). Our data analyses corroborated and extended established scholarly and practitioner conclusions about who is likely to quit. Specifically, our tests indicate that seniority is inversely related to quits but that this relationship varies across jobs. We also found performance to be negatively related to exits. Moreover, women turnover more than men (1.53 times higher), though this gender gap varies by seniority and occupation. Further, African (1.41 times higher than Whites) and Hispanic Americans (1.27 times higher than Whites) exit more than Caucasian, Asian, and Native Americans, while the turnover rate of African Americans converges to that of Whites over time. We discuss how these large-sample findings advance understanding of leavers' attributes as well as prescribe strategies for improving retention.