Some Reservations About a “Rational Choice” Model Predicting Employee Turnover

Professor Russell proposes a decision model of turnover in which the attractiveness of the current job is compared with that of an alternative. In turn, an employee chooses the option with the highest judged attractiveness. For example, “Employees make decisions to quit based on the relative attractiveness of their current job compared to alternative jobs or activities” (2013, p. 163). The attractiveness of one's current job and alternative are estimated by a regression equation assessing various attributes of the two targets (i.e., current job and alternative). Evoking March and Simon (1958) for a theoretical foundation, Professor Russell offers a subjectively “rational model” for the choice to stay or leave based on expectancy and expected value type decision models. In his empirical work, he uses a “policy capturing” simulation to identify how new hires personally weigh various job attributes when deciding whether they would quit hypothetical jobs varying in those attributes (Russell & Van Sell, 2012). When these weights are applied to employees' actual survey perceptions of the levels of job attributes, the resulting “simulated turnover intention” score predicts turnover better than a survey measure of quit intentions or job attributes alone. The inference is that turnover scholars can make substantial progress toward the prediction of actual turnover by using this model.