Promotion Denied! How Promotion Denial Impacts Turnover For Nonpromoted Employees

Abstract

Research into the effects of promotion decisions has primarily focused on the outcomes for promoted individuals without much concern about employees who were denied a promotion. Additionally, there has been a lack of research about the factors which lead promoted individuals to turnover within the public sector when looking at actual turnover. The present study looked at what effect promotion decisions have on employees regarding their turnover behavior by looking at a longitudinal governmental dataset. In total, 1570 promotion decisions were analyzed, looking at 1570 employees, of which 107 ended up turning over within two years of the initial promotion decision. After promotion denial, it was hypothesized that employee paygrade and organizational tenure would all be negatively related to turnover for employees and that having a higher performance rating would be a positive predictor of turnover for nonpromoted employees. Except for performance, interactions were conducted to see what effect the aforementioned variables of interest had on employee turnover. The relationships between promotion status, employee paygrade, and organizational tenure were all not found to be significant predictors of turnover one and two years after a promotion decision was made by the organization. When looking at employee performance, being considered a high performer and being denied a promotion was not found to influence turnover when compared to promoted employees. Lastly, when comparing high performing nonpromoted employees to lower performing employees who were denied a promotion no significant relationship was found between employee performance ratings and turnover.