Internal labor market strategies and turnover of information technology professionals

Abstract

Turnover is an important issue for organizations that employ Information Technology (IT) professionals. Much of the prior research on IT professionals has searched for causes of turnover from the perspective of the individual worker, examining factors such as job dissatisfaction, career orientation mismatch, and job compensation inadequacies. In this study, we examine the role of Internal Labor Market Strategies (ILMs) in retaining IT workers. We examine data collected from multiple informants on the ILM strategies for major IT occupations in IT organizations using agglomerative hierarchical clustering techniques. Our results suggest that there are distinct patterns in organizations' IT human resource strategies, that these strategies relate to differential turnover rates, and that organizational contingencies influence the deployment of these strategies.