Turnover Intention and Turnover Behavior

As the retirement wave of Baby Boomers approaches, retaining newly hired, mid-career, and retirement-eligible employees will be nearly as crucial as hiring top-quality new people. Using two large data sets on federal employees, we focus on whether human resource management (HRM) practices can affect turnover intention and whether they matter equally at all stages of the federal career. First, however, we test how well turnover intention predicts behavior using a 1% sample of the Central Personnel Data File (CPDF) and the 2005 Merit Principles Survey (MPS). Although turnover intention and behavior are correlated, they respond differently enough to demographic factors to suggest the need for caution in extrapolating the apparent impact of HRM practices from turnover intention to behavior.