Putting the Consequences of IT Turnover on the Map: A Review and Call for Research

Abstract

Among the many aspects of IT personnel studied by the IS research community, individual voluntary IT turnover is one of the most-examined phenomena. However, research into this phenomenon concentrates mainly on antecedents and cognitive precursors such as turnover intention. Antecedents are essential to understanding the turnover of IT personnel, but they do not represent the complete landscape of IT turnover research. The consequences of individual voluntary IT turnover, an important topic, have received too little attention from the IS community. I investigate this by conducting a multidisciplinary literature review of individual voluntary turnover consequences of IT personnel. My review reveals that only 8 of 130 IT turnover studies consider IT turnover consequences, concentrated primarily on software project management. I present a taxonomy of individual voluntary IT turnover consequences as a starting point for structured research on the consequences of individual voluntary IT turnover.