Editorial: Resignation and strategic retention: shaping the future workforce

Three studies attend to the psychological resources employees draw upon to remain engaged, and the conditions that deplete them. Freedman, Freedman, Choi, and Miller (2025) present striking longitudinal evidence of what they term an "Emotional Recession": a global 5.79% decline in emotional intelligence (EQ) across 28,000 adults in 166 countries between 2019 and 2024. The sharpest falls occurred in drive-related competencies including intrinsic motivation and optimism. Individuals with higher EQ were more than ten times more likely to report strong life outcomes. The implications for workforce engagement, resilience, and retention are substantial.Bam and Lulema (2025) take a deliberately different approach, using narrative inquiry to trace the experiences of professional women living with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Their study introduces the Continuum of Embodied Challenges, a conceptual framework illuminating how episodic chronic illness intersects with gendered and ableist workplace norms to impose extraordinary invisible labour on workers managing fluctuating capacity. The study is a timely reminder that retention scholarship must account for the structural conditions that make staying in work disproportionately costly for certain groups.Fan and colleagues (2025) examine job embeddedness among specialist nurses in China, using latent profile analysis to identify three distinct subgroups: a low-embedded alienation group, a medium-embedded group, and a high-embedded identity group. Professional mission emerged as a significant predictor of higher embeddedness, alongside factors such as self-assessed health and manageable work intensity. The findings call for targeted managerial strategies based on nurses' embeddedness profiles rather than uniform retention initiatives.Four studies examine retention from the perspective of formal HR practices and organisational systems, reflecting the growing recognition that individual-level interventions alone cannot address structural drivers of attrition. Alzuman and colleagues (2025) present the development and validation of the Organisational Health Behaviour Index (OHBI), a mixedmethods instrument encompassing both quantitative subscales (covering awareness, engagement, and communication satisfaction) and qualitative subscales (covering organisational culture and employee voice). Validated across 7,548 workers in Saudi industries, the OHBI offers a theoretically grounded and psychometrically robust tool for assessing retention conditions.Lee and Kim (2025) investigate how family-friendly policies (FFPs) and employee welfare policies (EWPs) affect quality of life, public service satisfaction, and turnover intention in the Korean public sector. Drawing on the JD-R model, they find EWP satisfaction is the more robust predictor across all outcomes, and that the retention benefits of FFPs are amplified under conditions of high job autonomy highlighting nuanced interaction effects with practical implications for designing context-sensitive HR strategy.Saurombe (2025) investigates talent management from the perspective of employees in a South African provincial government department, using a mixed-method case study. Participants emphasised the importance of proactive, inclusive leadership and practices that enable continuous human capital development. The findings highlight unmet needs around work-life balance, skills development, and succession planning, gaps that are unlikely to be unique to the South African public sector. Zhang, Wang, Lee, and Xu (2025) examine guanxi HRM practices in the Chinese context where the preferential allocation of resources and opportunities based on personal relationships. Using a three-wave survey, they find that guanxi practices are associated with increased turnover intention and reduced voice behaviour, mediated by diminished job meaningfulness. Notably, ethical leadership partially mitigated these harmful effects, highlighting the boundary conditions under which informal HR practices become corrosive.Three studies address changing structural conditions in how work is found, evaluated, and performed, reflecting the increasingly non-traditional landscape of contemporary employment. Naidu, Saurombe, and Mogoai (2026) investigate the candidate experience of virtual interviewing, using qualitative interviews to surface both the appeal and the limitations of this now-prevalent recruitment modality. Their findings point to fairness and geographic reach as genuine strengths of virtual formats, while one-way asynchronous communication and technology barriers remain meaningful deterrents. The research equips HR practitioners with candidate-centred insight at a moment when digital recruitment is unlikely to recede.Scheel, Mendling, and Schlagwein ( 2025) study motivation and performance in microtasking crowdsourcing environments, where the traditional employment relationship is effectively absent. Against expectation, their experimental findings reveal that autonomous motivation does not mediate the effects of job characteristics on performance or commitment. Instead, it is the mitigation of amotivation, rather than the cultivation of autonomous motivation, that drives performance and platform commitment. These findings challenge core assumptions of self-determination theory in the context of gig and platform work.Zheng, Mohd Puad, and Ab. Jalil (2025) offer a scoping review of job search selfefficacy (JSSE) research published between 2019 and 2025, synthesising 22 empirical studies within the Social Cognitive Career Theory framework. Key antecedents of JSSE include career adaptability, emotional intelligence, and mentoring support. The review identifies a disciplinary imbalance towards short-term outcome measurement and over-reliance on student samples that are important methodological gaps given the rapidly shifting nature of labour markets globally.Two studies attend to retention within specific relational and national contexts. Ma and Zhang (2025) examine how trust congruence between subordinates' expectations of being trusted (ELT) and their perceptions of actually being trusted (PLT) shapes upward ingratiation (UI) and the mediating role of ambivalent relational identity. Using three-wave dyadic data from 330 supervisor-subordinate pairs, they find that trust misalignment generates identity conflict that drives strategic ingratiation, a form of 'smiling while struggling', with practical implications for authentic workplace relationships and psychological safety.El Mountasser and Sahraoui (2025) provide empirical grounding from a frequently underrepresented context: private higher education institutions in Morocco. Their quantitative investigation of 196 employees identifies seven retention-relevant factors, with job satisfaction, organisational climate, and career development emerging as particularly influential. The study's actionable recommendations including personalised growth plans, regular feedback mechanisms, and competency-based training are applicable well beyond the Moroccan context.Collectively these 17 studies resist any simple formula for retaining talent. They reveal that an organisation's workforce is not a stable resource to be managed but a dynamic relational field shaped by leadership behaviour, institutional structures, individual psychological resources, and evolving contexts. The most consistent finding is perhaps the most significant: the forces that drive people out of organisations are frequently invisible, relational, and cumulative, while the formal retention strategies deployed in response are often generic, reactive, and insufficiently attentive to context. The editors hope this collection stimulates further research across these five thematic areas and proves useful to HR practitioners, organisational leaders, and policymakers seeking to build workplaces in which people genuinely choose to stay.