The retention of knowledge workers with the unfolding model of voluntary turnover

In the next century, the American and world economies will be firmly grounded in the information age. As such, retention of its key participant, namely, the knowledge worker, becomes critical to organizational well being. In this article, initial steps are taken toward understanding how to retain knowledge workers, with a particular focus on engineers. First, we apply a new and promising theory from the academic HRM literature (Hem & Griffeth 1995, pp. 85-86), the unfolding model of voluntary turnover (Lee & Mitchell 1994), in order to understand the four prototypical ways that knowledge workers might leave their organizations. Second, three widely accepted taxonomic types of engineers and five standard HRM practices are identified. As a conceptual tool, we created four matrices, with each corresponding to one of the four paths depicted by the unfolding model. Within each matrix, the five standard HRM functions were crossed with the three prototypical engineering types. We then ask, given the characteristics of each decision path, how might each HRM function facilitate the retention of each type of engineer? Finally, research implications are discussed.