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Abstract
Organizations, as a whole, have traditionally faced serious challenges and have incurred tremendous costs in recruiting, motivating, and retaining employees. The retention literature outlines seven major themes of factors that contribute to employees staying with a company. Motivation theory has also been applied to work settings and provides business examples of different motivators for employees. Furthermore, Enneagram theory may provide additional insights into what contributes to different employees' joining, staying with, or leaving organizations. This study used an online survey of International Enneagram Association members and affiliates to evaluate various hypotheses around differences in employment-related decisions to join, stay with, or leave an organization being explained by differences in Enneagram type.
A Business Context
Employee retention is a significant concern and expense for every organization, with the expense of recruiting and retraining a new worker costing anywhere from half to 200% of the departing employees annual salary, depending on employee level and factoring in separation processing, coworker burden, overtime costs, recruitment and training costs, lost productivity, loss of clients, loss of intellectual capital, etc. (US Dept. of Labor). Corporations have implemented traditional solutions to address the challenge of employee turnover, focusing on:
* Career development opportunities
* Challenging and meaningful work in alignment with employees' career interests
* Employer's culture and reputation
* The organization's commitment to the employee and employee level of job involvement
* Organizational and supervisory support (including relationship with supervisor)
* Honest and truthful recruitment processes
* Compensation- and rewards-related retention mechanisms
The above categories are obvious generaUzations that may not appeal or apply to aU individuals and their particular situations and personal motivations. Since employee motivation is not just innate, but also Unked to the work environment and work relationships (a concept brought to Ught by the famous Hawthorne experiments), the Enneagram, as a personaUty and motivation typing system, is a perfect instrument to provide further insight and explanation to the chaUenge of employee retention and motivation.
To be clear, Enneatyping candidates for selection purposes is not what is being advocated here. What is being recommended is the creation of a variety of options and alternatives for a total employee retention system to address areas that matter to aU employees as weU as focusing on certain others...