Terence Mitchell

University of Washington Seattle | UW · Department of Management

Although job embeddedness has consistently been shown to be associated with positive workplace behaviors, our theoretical understanding of such associations remains far behind our empirical knowledge. In particular, it is unclear how job embeddedness goes beyond its common conceptualization as "stuckness" to motivate employees' discretionary, chang...

Recent meta-analytic studies imply that groups often find ways of neutralizing turnover’s harmful effects and that important moderators of the turnover–performance relationship must be missing from the literature. Building on theory and findings related to the threat–rigidity effect, we suggest that groups tend to respond maladaptively to turnover...

It's no secret, of course, that many people quit their jobs. Whether voluntary employee turnover is a problem, however, “depends.” Sometimes, an individual's volitional quitting can be a major problem. In certain parts of the food and beverage industry, for example, turnover is routinely well over 100 percent annually, and many managers must often...

Recent narrative reviews (e.g., Hom, Mitchell, Lee, & Griffeth, 2012; Hom, Lee, Shaw, & Hausknecht, 2017) advise that it is timely to assess the progress made in research on voluntary employee turnover so as to guide future work. To provide this assessment, we employed a three-step approach. First, we conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of turn...

It has recently been suggested that attribution theory expand its locus of causality dimension beyond internal and external attributions to include relational (i.e., interpersonal) attributions (Eberly, Holley, Johnson, & Mitchell, 2011). The current investigation was designed to empirically focus on relationship dynamics, specifically where 1 memb...

We present the first major test of proximal withdrawal states theory (PWST; Hom, Mitchell, Lee, & Griffeth, 2012). In addition, we develop and test new ideas to demonstrate how PWST improves our understanding and prediction of employee turnover. Across 2 studies, we corroborate that reluctant stayers (those who want to leave but have to stay) are s...

Empirical research establishes complementary approaches to understand the turnover process. Two of these approaches focus on who quits and how they quit. In the first approach, leaving is traditionally described through a process initiated by an individual's feelings and beliefs. More specifically, job dissatisfaction is theorized to initiate a var...

Organizations are dynamic, hierarchically structured entities. Such dynamism is reflected in the emergence of significant events at every organizational level. Despite this fact, there has been relatively little discussion about how events become meaningful and come to impact organizations across space and time. We address this gap by developing ev...

Owing to the organizational disruption and associated high costs incurred when workers leave an organization, both scholars and practitioners alike have sought to better understand labor turnover (i.e., the cessation of an individual's membership in an organization). The following review represents a summary of how organizational scholarship has ad...

More than two decades have passed since Griffeth, Hom, & Gaertner (2000) published the last comprehensive meta-analysis of voluntary turnover. Considering the criticality of voluntary turnover as an organizational outcome and the volume of research that has been conducted since the year 2000, it seems prudent to provide an updated empirical assessm...

As a result of recent preventable corporate failures (e.g., Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae), there is a growing desire to understand what might motivate employees to courageously detect and deflect organizational problems before they harm the entire organization. Based on 94 interviews we conducted with a wide variety of employees who...

In this article, we examine the history and development of job embeddedness, beginning with the story of the idea's conception, theoretical foundation, and original empirical structure as a major predictor of employee voluntary turnover. We then consider more recent expansions in the theoretical structure and empirical measurement of job embeddedne...

We focus on the contributions to research generated by considering attitudes and behaviors as dynamic over time and across different levels. Using turnover research as an example, we demonstrate how a past, present, and future focus, across levels, may enhance both theory and methodology. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We theorize about and examine empirically the increase in predictive strength of antecedents of voluntary turnover over the first three years of employment using survival analysis with time-varying covariates and period effects. On the basis of employee survey data gathered from 240 newcomers working in a retail bank and organizational turnover rec...

We draw on eight different lab and field samples to delineate the effects of expressed humility on several important organizational outcomes, including performance, satisfaction, learning goal orientation, engagement, and turnover. We first review several literatures to define the construct of expressed humility, discuss its implications in social...

Professor Russell proposes a decision model of turnover in which the attractiveness of the current job is compared with that of an alternative. In turn, an employee chooses the option with the highest judged attractiveness. For example, “Employees make decisions to quit based on the relative attractiveness of their current job compared to alternati...

In this study, we examine the influence of hometown proximity on collegiate athletic recruit performance. The geographic proximity of a new recruit's local community to a recruiting organization can influence the recruit's performance after joining an organization. However, the direction of the effect of such proximity is not clear. Previous resear...

This study takes a dynamic multilevel approach to examine how the relationship between an employee's job satisfaction trajectory and subsequent turnover may change depending on the employee's unit's job satisfaction trajectory and its dispersion. Analyses of longitudinal multilevel data collected from 5,270 employees in 175 business units of a hosp...

We reconceptualize employee turnover to promote researchers' understanding and prediction of why employees quit or stay in employing institutions. A literature review identifies shortcomings with prevailing turnover dimensions. In response, we expand the conceptual domain of the turnover criterion to include multiple types of turnover (notably, inv...

In this article, we reply to Bergman, Payne, and Boswell (2012) and Maertz (2012), who commented on our reconceptualization of the employee turnover criterion and proximal withdrawal states (Hom, Mitchell, Lee, & Griffeth, 2012). We agree with some points (e.g., anticipated destinations) but take issue with others (e.g., turnover intentions as the...

The present meta-analytic study introduces an overall model of the relationships between job embeddedness and turnover outcomes. Drawing on 65 independent samples (N = 42,907), we found that on-the-job and off-the-job embeddedness negatively related to turnover intentions and actual turnover, after controlling for job satisfaction, affective commit...

Approximately 10 years ago, Lee et al. reviewed the qualitative methods published during 1979–99 in the major US journals in the organizational sciences. This ten‐year follow‐up review of 198 qualitative articles assesses the progress made in qualitative research in management by specifically considering: (1) the strength and legitimacy of recent p...

Managing a successful research team involves a variety of activities and potential issues. In this article, we discuss these issues based on our experience of having worked together for 20 years with regular team meetings that include Ph.D. and undergraduate students and occasionally other faculty colleagues. We attempt to describe the challenges t...

摘要管理一个成功的科研团队涉及到许多活动和潜在问题。我们的团队包括了博士生和本科生，偶尔还会有其他的教员同事，二十多年来一直共同合作并进行小组讨论。本文希望探讨一些团队合作中可能面临的包括伦理问题等的挑战，并给出我们这些年总结的一些经验。我们提出并回答了关于团队合作过程中的九个问题，同时在文章最后进行了简要总结。

Attribution theory argues that people assess the locus of causality of achievement-relevant events as either internal or external. Given the frequency of interpersonal interactions in organizations, we posit that a third category-relational attributions-may be used. Drawing on relational perspectives, we lay the conceptual foundation and develop a...

Expectancy theory and decision theory are described as models that can be used to predict occupational preference and choice. The empirical research using these models is reviewed and found to be highly supportive. Every investigation showed considerable support for the model being tested. The implications for practice and further research are disc...

The present research examines the differential validity of the facets of organizational commitment and job embeddedness to predict who will reenlist or retire from a branch of the armed services. We tested hypotheses with survey data from 1839 enlisted personnel in the U.S. Air Force. For personnel facing the decision to reenlist or separate, conti...

This is an essay in which I discuss aspects of my career, things I would do differently, advice to new professors, including some guidelines and principles that worked well for me, and given the future of Business Schools, what changes do I foresee? I describe my first few years as rather smooth and uneventful thanks to the mentors and resources th...

We examined whether and how various biases may influence customers' satisfaction evaluations and produce discriminatory judgments for minority and female service employees. We argue that customer satisfaction evaluations are biased because they are anonymous judgments by untrained raters that usually lack an evaluation standard. Laboratory and fiel...

Unpleasant events are a fact of organizational life. The way in which people respond to such events, however, varies. In the present study, we hypothesized and found that some individuals choose to respond to negative events in ways that helped the organization. Instead of withdrawing in an attempt to “get even” by reducing work outputs, these indi...

Accountability is viewed as a fundamental principle of organization theory, yet theoretical and empirical research on this important construct has lagged behind its pivotal role in organizations. The present study tested portions of a model of accountability, examining job and organizational characteristics as predictors and employee influence tact...

The current article presents a systematic approach to theory pruning (defined here as hypothesis specification and study design intended to bound and reduce theory). First, we argue that research that limits theory is underrepresented in the organizational sciences, erring overwhelmingly on the side of confirmatory null hypothesis testing. Second,...

This research developed and tested a model of turnover contagion in which the job embeddedness and job search behaviors of coworkers influence employees' decisions to quit. In a sample of 45 branches of a regional bank and 1,038 departments of a national hospitality firm, multilevel analysis revealed that coworkers' job embeddedness and job search...

This research developed and tested a model of turnover contagion in which the job embeddedness and job search behaviors of coworkers influence employees' decisions to quit. In a sample of 45 branches of a regional bank and 1,038 departments of a national hospitality firm, multilevel analysis revealed that coworkers' job embedded-ness and job search...

Given the extensive research on the topic of voluntary employee turnover in the past decade as well as new managerial approaches to employee retention, labor market dynamism, and evolution in research methodology and technology, it is important that researchers evaluate the current state of the field. In this chapter, we critically review prior res...

This special issue contains six papers that address a variety of practical research process questions. The papers explore how theory and method inevitably interact in particular organization and management studies. Here we offer an overview of how theory and method have been treated to date by organization researchers and suggest that respecting bo...

Les problemes de pouvoir, l'abus de pouvoir et le fait d'avoir a repondre de ses decisions, constituent des preoccupations majeures pour les organisations et les gouvernements a travers le monde. Les histoires d'escroquerie, d'erreurs de gestion et de conduites deontologiquement douteuses sont courantes dans la litterature specialisee, ainsi que da...

The paper presents an extension of decision theory to the analysis of social power. The power of a person, A, over another person, B, is viewed in terms of the effect A has on B's decision. The analysis is based on the idea that B's decision regarding the performance of alternative behaviors is a function of 1) B's utility for the consequences of t...

Business schools have paid a lot of attention to restructuring and invigorating their MBA and executive offerings but little attention to their PhD programs. With increasing demand for qualified professors and decreasing supply, however, there is an urgent need to examine our PhD education as well. We need to be preparing our future professors to m...

ABSTRACT Most research on voluntary turnover has focused on dissatisfaction-induced and rational decisionmaking processes, with some attention paid to external market influences. This focus leaves unexplained a large portion of the variance in why people choose to quit a job. Recently, however, researchers are considering the alternative ways that...

This paper presents a review and integrative model of how, when, and why the behaviors of one negative group member can have powerful, detrimental influence on teammates and groups. We define the negative group member as someone who persistently exhibits one or more of the following behaviors: withholding effort from the group, expressing negative...

A laboratory experiment was designed to test the effect of group member interdependence on supervisory performance ratings. Subjects played the role of supervisors in charge of evaluating members of a three-person work group which was constructed to include two good performers and one poor performer. Supervisors were either told that group members...

Employee turnover is costly to organizations. Some of the costs are obvious (e.g., recruiting, selecting, and training expenses) and others are not so obvious (e.g., diminished customer service ability, lack of continuity on key projects, and loss of future leadership talent). Understanding the value inherent in attracting and keeping excellent emp...

This study examined the relative effectiveness of three different verbal recruitment strategies (opinion conformity, other enhancement, and self-enhancement) presented in different orders. Sixty undergraduates viewed three recruiters, each of whom used a different recruitment strategy to describe a hypothetical graduate program. Participants rated...

The Green and Mitchell (1979) model of the process by which supervisors diagnose and deal with the causes of subordinates' poor performance is based upon attribution theory. The notion is that the supervisor makes an attribution about the cause of the poor performance and then selects an appropriate response or solution to deal with the problem. Tw...

The modern workplace is a fast-paced environment where there are many opportunities to be interrupted during the workday. Interruptions lead to postponing work on the interrupted task, influence goal abandonment, and can lead to the experience of negative emotions such as anger, resentment and stress. Few researchers have examined workplace interru...

Two experiments were conducted to examine the potential negative consequences an organization may face in response to perceptions of interactional injustice. Study 1 found that one potentially negative reaction to perceived injustice can be intended retaliation. In addition, study 1 found that individuals with high self-esteem are most likely to re...

Voluntary employee turnover is expensive. Companies that successfully retain the best and brightest employees save money and protect their intellectual capital. Traditional approaches to understanding turnover place accumulated job dissatisfaction as the primary antecedent to voluntary turnover. However, we show that precipitating events, or shocks...

This article describes a new approach for assessing cognitive precursors to aggression. Referred to as the Conditional Reasoning Measurement System, this procedure focuses on how people solve what on the surface appear to be traditional inductive reasoning problems. The true intent of the problems is to determine if solutions based on implicit bias...

Work flow policies are shown to induce a change in average between-workers variability (worker heterogeneity) and within-worker variability in performance times. In a laboratory experiment, the authors measured the levels of worker heterogeneity and within-worker variability under an individual performance condition, a work sharing condition, and a...

This study extends theory and research on job embeddedness, which was disaggregated into its two major subdimensions, on-the-job and off-the-job embeddedness. As hypothesized, regression analyses revealed that off-the-job embeddedness was significantly predictive of subsequent "voluntary turnover" and volitional absences, whereas on-the-job embedde...

The Conditional Reasoning Measurement System is described. This procedure focuses on how people solve what on the surface appear to be inductive reasoning problems. The true intent of the problems is to determine if solutions based on implicit biases are logically attractive to a respondent. In this article, we focus on the types of implicit biases...

This chapter reviews the topic of motivation. We start with a definition of this construct and how it fits with other constructs like effort, persistence, and performance. The underlying organizing idea for the chapter is various tensions in our field. We then proceed to review different motivational approaches that represent the different perspect...

We propose a model in which between-individual differences in performance (heterogeneity) and within-individual differences in performance over time (variability) affect flow line performance. The impact of heterogeneity and variability is contingent upon the flow line context, particularly the rules governing the way work moves between employees (...

We propose a model in which between-individual differences in performance (heterogeneity) and within-individual differences in performance over time (variability) affect flow line performance. The impact of heterogeneity and variability is contingent upon the flow line context, particularly the rules governing the way work moves between employees (...

In this chapter, a comprehensive approach to understanding voluntary employee turnover and retention is described. First, the literature on employee turnover is briefly reviewed because many of our ideas are grounded in existing theory and research. Second, our recent theory on why and how people leave the organization (called the Unfolding Model o...

A new construct, entitled 'job embeddedness,' is introduced. It includes individuals' (1) links to other people, teams, and groups, (2) perceptions of their fit with job, organization, and community, and (3) what they say they would have to sacrifice if they left their jobs. We developed a measure of job embeddedness with two samples. The results s...

The competition to retain key employees is intense. Top-level executives and HR departments spend large amounts of time, effort, and money trying to figure out how to keep their people from leaving. This article describes some new research and its implications for managing turnover and retention. These ideas challenge the conventional wisdom that d...

The competition to retain key employees is intense. Top-level executives and HR departments spend large amounts of time, effort, and money trying to figure out how to keep their people from leaving. This article describes some new research and its implications for managing turnover and retention. These ideas challenge the conventional wisdom that d...

In any investigation of a causal relationship between an X and a Y, the time when X and Y are measured is crucial for determining whether X causes Y, as well as the true strength of that relationship. Using past research and a review of current research, we develop a set of X,Y configurations that describe the main ways that causal relationships ar...

In this chapter, a comprehensive approach to understanding voluntary employee turnover and retention is described. First, the literature on employee turnover is briefly reviewed because many of our ideas are grounded in existing theory and research. Second, our recent theory on why and how people leave the organization (called the Unfolding Model o...

We assessed collective efficacy (a group's judgment of their ability to perform a particular task) and some dimensions of shared mental models (models of the group structure, process and the task, that members hold in common) in student groups working on semester-long research projects. In particular, we assessed the extent to which group members h...

In this essay, qualitative research is shown to consist of a set of methods that fits very nicely with some of the research questions asked by organizational and vocational psychologists. Because many researchers want additional tools, interest in these qualitative techniques appears to be growing. Two metagoals of this article are (a) to bolster t...

This work reports further theoretical development of Lee and Mitchell's (1994) unfolding model of voluntary turnover, which describes different psychological paths that people take when quitting organizations. Ambiguities in the model were identified, and hypotheses aimed at resolving these ambiguities were tested on a sample of 229 former employee...

We discuss individual differences in the meanings people attach to money. We briefly review the management theory and research that describe money as a motivator and how attitudes about pay influence behavior. Following this is a section on money as an individual-difference construct, how it is defined and measured, and to what it is related. We co...

The extent to which managers and teachers used policies or individualized treatment to deal with poorly performing subordinates and students was examined in two field studies. Over half of the 441 participants responded to poor performance by invoking a policy, while the remaining participants reported that they would handle each poor performance c...

A manual production line was examined for effects of 2 different material flow policies and 3 different goal-setting policies. The line used a push system, where workers work at their own pace (assuming available work) and pass work to the next station as soon as the work is completed, and a pull system, where workers pass work only when the next w...

In a series of three investigations we examined people's anticipation of, actual experiences in, and subsequent recollection of meaningful life events: a trip to Europe, a Thanksgiving vacation, and a 3-week bicycle trip in California. The results of all three studies supported the hypothesis that people's expectations of personal events are more p...

Starting from recent approaches in mental model research, it is argued that (1) logical inference rules are used in order to construct mental cliques from learned sentiment relations, and (2) social context cues (operationalized as primes) play a crucial role in activating such rules. Transitivity and antitransitivity are taken as examples, and are...

This study examines the effect of training to reduce biases and heuristics on the consequence of judgments. We demonstrate that untrained subjects' judgments may systematically yield better consequences than judgments of subjects trained to reduce biases and heuristics. This result implies that educators should use caution when interpreting the fin...

A survey was conducted of the perceived correlates of illegal abuses in the electronics industry. Human resource directors of thirty-one firms responded to a questionnaire which assessed their perceptions of the degree to which illegal behavior was caused by (1) deficiencies in the moral character of employees (2) the clarity of expectations and st...

We report a test of Lee and Mitchell's model of voluntary employee departure from an organization. Data gathered from interviews with nurses who had recently quit their jobs and a mailed survey were analyzed qualitatively via pattern matching and quantitatively through correlations, analysis of medians, log linear modeling, and contingency tables....

begin with an informal description of image theory, followed by a more formal presentation / describe the main themes and findings of research on image theory studies of screening / studies of choice (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

This paper reports on two experiments which explore how individuals with high and low self-efficacy differ in the way they interpret performance feedback and make causal attributions to sustain their self-efficacy perceptions for subsequent performance attempts. The results from Study 1 show that high self-efficacy people make self-serving attribut...

This research examined the types of goals managers select and whether these goals vary as a function of the type and context of the task. A 2 x 2 factorial design was used with a complex/simple task as one independent variable and an independent/interdependent work context as the other independent variable. Results indicate that output and outcome...

Ss completed 7 trials of a complex computer task that simulated the job of an air traffic controller. Performance was calculated by combining points for the number of planes landed minus penalty points. Throughout the trials, Ss completed questionnaires assessing their self-efficacy goals, expected performance, and the degree to which certain judgm...

The application of traditional goal-setting theory to the managerial goal-setting context is discussed in relation to the choice of goal indicators and goal standards. Managerial work is characterized by complex causal paths, socially mediated outcomes, dynamic, evolving tasks, and multiple time frames. These characteristics make the application of...

The model of employee turnover described in this paper applies constructs and concepts from decision making, statistics, and social psychology to facilitate understanding and to redirect theory development and empirical research. The process of employee turnover is modeled by four distinctive decision paths; each decision path involves distinctive...

The model of employee turnover described in this paper applies constructs and concepts from decision making, statistics, and social psychology to facilitate understanding and to redirect theory development and empirical research. The process of employee turnover is modeled by four distinctive decision paths; each decision path involves distinctive...