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To maximize the value derived from human capital, organizations seek to motivate and retain their employees. But what happens when they are successful at only the latter half of that equation? What are the consequences of retaining employees who would prefer to leave? To address this issue, two research questions were formulated. First, is it possible to reliably predict the profile of enthusiastic and reluctant stayers in an organization? Second, what is the financial impact of retaining reluctant stayers? Four panels of data over the course of two years were collected from two non-profit organizations. Analyses demonstrated that it is possible to predict enthusiastic vs. reluctant staying and identified well-known antecedents that will help organizations to forecast the likelihood of employees entering one or the other status. Further, integrating dynamic predictors significantly increased the variance explained by the models. Finally, analysis of organizational data about employees with fund-raising performance metrics revealed that reluctant stayers raised on average $1,000,000 less per year than enthusiastic stayers.
For decades, researchers and practitioners have explored the antecedents to turnover in an attempt to anticipate and manage it better (Lee et al., 2017). Related research has estimated the costs and other consequences of turnover (Heavey et al., 2013; Call et al., 2015; Hancock et al., 2013). Until recently, few researchers have attempted to understand what happens when people stay reluctantly rather than leave, and fewer still have explored the associated costs. Yet consultants at Gallup estimate that less than one-third of U.S. employees are engaged in their jobs (Mann and Harter, 2016). Furthermore, unhappy workers cost the U.S. $450 billion to $550 billion a year, due to high absenteeism, quality-control issues, and lost productivity (Korn, 2013). One purpose of this article is to confront the assumption that employees leaving an organization is bad and that staying in the organization is good. In 2012, Hom e,t al. nudged the field in this direction when they expanded the turnover criterion in articulating proximal withdrawal states (PWS) theory and introduced the concept of "reluctant stayers."
In recent years, there has also been an increase in organizational efforts to apply sophisticated analytical approaches to better understand a range of complex and important workforce issues (Huselid, 2018). Using a variety of data collection tools...