Employees' roles as organizational members often do not end immediately after they have made the decision to leave or it has been made for them. Instead, this decision serves as a turning point initiating an exit transition process. The purpose of this article is to consolidate prior scholarship in order to gain an understanding of the state of the science, as it pertains to exit transitions. Our literature review yielded almost 200 articles that have directly or indirectly studied the exit transition process. In organizing the insights from these studies, four categories of exit transition scholarship emerged—exit transitions in the context of voluntary turnover, involuntary turnover, temporary transitions, and top management exits. Moreover, our review indicated that exit transitions are shaped by three critical forces—the permanence of the transition, the magnitude of the identity change associated with the exit, and the organizational impact of the exit. We review research on each of the four categories and show how each type of transition is shaped by these forces. Finally, we turn our focus to the future of work and discuss how changes in the way that work is structured may alter the study of employee exit transitions in the future.
Organizations are key mechanisms by which racism is enacted and perpetuated. Although much of the management literature has focused on organizational efforts to combat racial discrimination, some of the most transformative changes come from the everyday actions of employees themselves. In this study, we develop grounded theory on racial minority employees who choose to challenge racism from within the organizational structures that perpetuate it most (i.e., highly racialized organizations). We present a theoretical model of employee anti-racism that emerged from our analysis of qualitative data-comprising 80.7 audio hours from 48 interviews with Black law enforcement officers. This model articulates anti-racism motivation as a key mechanism that motivates racial minority employees to join and stay within highly racialized organizations. Our analysis suggests that these employees enact anti-racism behaviors targeted at both the racialized organization and their racial community, with these behaviors playing a critical role in positively transforming the interface between the organization and the communities that are harmed by racism. Perceptions of transformation help sustain racial minority employees' anti-racism motivation, particularly as they experience continued racism and encounter backlash for their anti-racism efforts. In the absence of perceived transformation, we found that racial minority employees are likely to withdraw from the highly racialized organization. Altogether, our study provides a theoretical and practical roadmap highlighting how racial minority employees combat racism via organizational membership and sustain their positive impact on both their work organization and their racial communities.
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