Summary Employee turnover has long been considered a prominent concern for managers because it is associated with expenses, such as loss of productivity and replacement costs. Moreover, employee turnover is also detrimental to an organization because it may stimulate additional incidents of turnover within the workplace. That is, employee turnover can be “contagious” in that employees tend to imitate the turnover‐related attitudes and behaviors of their coworkers. To date, the “turnover contagion” phenomenon has been investigated from multiple perspectives, splintering this research into several, seemingly distinct topics. Because of such diverse approaches to studying the spread of turnover, we lack a clear perspective on what turnover contagion is, how the turnover contagion process unfolds, and how to manage it. To resolve the ambiguities surrounding the turnover contagion process, we review 42 research papers relevant to the turnover contagion process. Based on our review, we present an integrated perspective on “turnover contagion” that clearly delineates this phenomenon, describes what the extant research says about how coworker turnover processes impact employees' propensities to leave, and offers future research directions with the potential to deepen our understanding and management of turnover contagion.

Whereas informal job search (i.e., using personal contacts for job search) is positively associated with the receipt of job offers, research has yet to consider the extent to which informal job search translates into current employees’ turnover decisions or to investigate factors that may restrain (or facilitate) the translation of informal job search into turnover decisions. In this study, we propose that on-the-job and off-the-job embeddedness play distinct roles in strengthening or weakening the positive relationship between informal job search and turnover intentions and behavior. We assert that on-the-job embeddedness reduces the likelihood that informal job search translates into turnover decisions, whereas off-the-job embeddedness strengthens the positive association between informal job search and turnover decisions. We tested these hypotheses across two samples of employed nurses. Although results were mixed, we found evidence that on-the-job embeddedness dampened the positive relationships of informal job search with turnover intentions and behaviors, whereas off-the-job embeddedness facilitated the positive relationships between informal job search and turnover decisions. Taken together, findings suggest that on-the-job and off-the-job embeddedness influence informal job search processes differently. We discuss the implications of these findings for how organizations manage employees’ informal job search activities as well as how researchers approach the study of job embeddedness.

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This study investigates how people weight potential relationship partners' personal characteristics (i.e., warmth and competence) when deciding to initiate professional versus personal network relationships, and it also examines how certain personality traits (extraversion and conscientiousness) shape this process. Results from two samples indicate that people tend to value competence more highly when initiating professional relationships, whereas they tend to value warmth more highly when initiating personal relationships. Furthermore, neither extraversion nor conscientiousness was related to how people weighted competence when initiating professional relationships. However, supplementary analyses demonstrated that people high in conscientiousness tend to value competence and people high in agreeableness tend to value warmth in their network relationship partners, regardless of whether they are initiating a professional or personal relationship.

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