Determinants of Turnover Intentions: Comparing IC and IS Personnel

Personnel is one of the most important resources for the performance of Information Systems (IS) and Information Center (IC) organizations. The scarcity of new employees, the difficulty of training and a high turnover make personnel management in these areas a difficult problem. For IS employees, the relationships between job satisfaction, organizational commitment and intention to leave the organization have been established. Because the size of the investment and the number of organizations establishing IC organizations are growing dramatically, it has become important to understand the determinants of turnover intentions for IC as well as IS employees. Are IC employees similar to their IS counterparts? Or, is their nature basically different, as some studies have suggested? This study examines the differences between IS and IC employees in terms of demographic characteristics, participation on boundary spanning activities, role stressors, overall job satisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intentions. The differences are found to be significant and call for special attention from IC managers to manage more properly their personnel resources. IC employees were found to participate more extensively in boundary spanning activities, experienced more role stressors (role ambiguity and role conflict), were less satisfied with their jobs and less committed to their organization. The findings also demonstrate the importance of organizational commitment as an intervening variable in models of turnover. While overall job satisfaction had both direct and indirect effects on turnover intentions among IC employees, for IS personnel it had only indirect effects through organizational commitment. The effects of role stressors and boundary spanning activities were found to be indirect via overall job satisfaction and organizational commitment for both IC and IS employees. The implications of these findings for practicing managers and for future research are discussed.