Meta-Analytic Review of Employee Turnover as a Predictor of Firm Performance
verifiedrich profile · Journal of Management · 2011
Hancock, Julie I.; Allen, David G.; Bosco, Frank A.; McDaniel, Karen R.; Pierce, Charles A.
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
employee turnover → customer satisfaction
employee turnover → organizational performance
collective turnover → business unit performance
collective turnover → organizational performance
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
collective turnover predicts business unit performance
collective turnover predicts customer satisfaction
collective turnover predicts organizational performance
employee turnover predicts customer satisfaction
employee turnover predicts organizational performance
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
Previous research has primarily revealed a negative relationship between collective employee turnover and organizational performance. However, this research also suggests underlying complexity in the relationship. To clarify the nature of this relationship, the authors conduct a meta-analytic review in which they test and provide support for a portion of Hausknecht and Trevor’s model of collective turnover. The authors’ meta-analysis includes 48 independent samples reporting 157 effect size estimates ( N = 24,943), tests six hypothesized moderator variables, and provides path analyses to test alternative conceptualizations of the turnover–organizational performance relationship. Results indicate that the mean corrected correlation between turnover and organizational performance is −.03, but this relationship is moderated by several important variables. For example, the relationship is stronger in manufacturing and transportation industries (−.07), for managerial employees (−.08), in midsize organizations (−.07), in samples from labor market economies (−.05), and when organizational performance is operationalized in terms of customer service (−.10) or quality and safety (−.12) metrics. In addition, proximal performance outcomes mediate relationships with financial performance. The authors discuss implications of their results for theory and practice and provide directions for future research.
What the literature says about it
Attributed, open-access quotes from other works that cite this article, plus the citation-graph verdict tally. Corroborations and disputes, in one place — the honest-broker view.
supports “Employee turnover has been a vital issue for management and applied psychology and research studies, as well as meta-analytic tests, show negative relationships between turnover rates and organizational performance [39,40].”
Ancillary research
Neighbouring works in the citation graph around this article.
- 10.4018/ijkm.291096
- 10.22367/jem.2025.47.04
- 10.1177/00018392211014819
- 10.1037/a0032380
- 10.3390/nursrep11040088
Assembled from Principia’s registry — bibliographic record, extracted effect sizes, the models they inform, and open-access citing literature.