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Introduction
Predicting voluntary turnover and turnover intentions is an important topic of study. Maintaining long-term skilled employees is crucial for every company (Carmeli and Weisberg, 2006). Also, the voluntary turnover of employees can cost the organization over one and a half times the employee's annual salary, if overall costs are taken into account such as reassigning tasks, recruiting and training replacements (Perryer et al. , 2010). Next, it has been shown that companies with a high voluntary turnover rate have significantly lower performances than their rivals (Felps et al. , 2009). This may easily endanger a company's future opportunities in the marketplace (Sexton et al. , 2005).
Employee turnover can be situated in the domain of manpower planning. Manpower planning models, based on estimations of transition probabilities characterizing employee mobility, are used to predict future staff compositions. These predictions are necessary to ensure that the right people will be available at the right positions at the right times (Bartholomew et al. , 1991; Khoong, 1996). To this end, both internal and external transitions should be taken into account. There are two types of external transitions: incoming external transitions and outgoing external transitions. The latter can be referred to as wastage. According to Bartholomew et al. (1991), manpower wastage is the most fundamental issue in manpower planning owing to the fact that wastage creates vacancies, and therefore provides opportunities for promotion and recruitment (Ugwuowo and McClean, 2000). Successful manpower planning will thus depend to a great extent on describing and predicting wastage within a company (Ugwuowo and McClean, 2000). This paper will focus on predicting external voluntary outgoing transitions, i.e. if the employee decides to leave the company voluntarily. This type of wastage is referred to as voluntary turnover. Voluntary turnover is the most problematic issue for companies, as this decision is out of the company's control (Sexton et al. , 2005). To gather insights on voluntary turnover, often, turnover intention is investigated. Turnover intention is "the behavioural tendency of employees to attempt to leave their work organization, which may lead to actual turnover" (Chen et al. , 2014).
Research on voluntary turnover and turnover intention is mostly based on survey data (Carmeli and Weisberg, 2006; Chen et al. , 2014; Crossley et al....