One Size Does Not Fit All: Global Perspectives on IT Worker Turnover

Abstract

Although the IT workforce has become increasingly global, much of the research on issues related to IT workers published in leading academic journals is conducted in the U.S. However, the majority of the world does not share the same context as the U.S. Despite that, comparative studies exploring country differences rarely demonstrate how and why these differences occur on a global scale. By relying on a dataset based on a survey of more than 10 000 IT workers in 37 countries, we employed the decision tree technique to build an accurate model of IT job turnover in the U.S. We then applied this model to 36 countries to test whether it is more accurate in countries that are similar to the U.S. in terms of their geographical proximity to the U.S. and the proximity of their cultural, political, and labor market contexts. The findings demonstrate that while the U.S. model of IT job turnover is not necessarily less accurate for countries that are geographically farther from the U.S., it is less applicable in the countries with cultural, political, and labor market conditions different from those of the U.S. Thus, global IT managers are recommended to interpret the U.S.-centric literature with caution.