Chronic excessive turnover among information technology (IT) professionals has been costly to firms for decades with annual turnover rates as high as 24% even among Computerworld’s “100 Best Places to Work in IT.” Prior information systems literature has identified two key factors affecting turnover: boundary-spanning roles and low promotability in one’s current firm. We draw on tournament theory, which is primarily concerned with inducing effort in employees, to decompose promotability into two distinct constructs: the likelihood of promotion and benefit from promotion, and demonstrate that each has a distinct role in affecting turnover rates. Our key result is that a job ladder motivating IT professionals with large, infrequent promotions will lead to higher turnover than a job ladder with smaller, more frequent promotions. We describe the conditions under which rearranging the job ladder creates economic value for the firm. We also offer an explanation for the observation that jobs characterized by boundary-spanning activities have higher turnover, and show that such jobs are more sensitive to the effect of likelihood of promotion on turnover. We test our hypotheses on a detailed data set covering 5,704 IT professionals over a five-year period. We confirm that likelihood of promotion has the predicted effects on turnover of IT professionals. A one standard deviation increase in likelihood of promotion decreases turnover by over 99%, consistent with our prediction. The empirical analysis also confirms the predicted effects of boundary spanning activities.
Disagreements between television networks or channels like AMC or Viacom, and media distributors like Comcast or DISH are endemic. In this research, we study the nature of contractual relationship between the television networks and media distributors in a multilayered two-sided framework to explain why carriage disputes (which are obviously nonequilibrium outcomes) have become so common in the current media marketplace. We find that there is a strategic tension between the interests of TV network companies and media distributor companies, and that maintaining agreements between these firms require non-contractible actions. These non-contractible actions are very different from the natural behavior of the firms, so the agreement can only be maintained if each firm has recourse to a credible, costly, and temporary threat-a carriage dispute.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.