Understanding Employee Turnover in the Public Sector: Insights from Research on Teacher Mobility

Abstract

Employee turnover is a key area for public administration research, but one about which there is much still to be learned. Insights from an extensive body of research on employee turnover in a specifi c area of the public sector-public education-contributes to the understanding of employee mobility in public organizations more generally. Th e authors present a conceptual framework for understanding employee turnover that is grounded in economic theories of labor supply and demand, which have formed the foundation of many studies of teacher turnover. Th e main fi ndings of this body of work are documented, noting connections to the literature on public employee turnover, lessons that can be learned, and potential new areas for empirical inquiry for scholars of turnover in the public sector. Practitioner Points• An extensive research base on turnover among public school teachers can be useful for policy makers, practitioners, and researchers interested in the factors that lead some public employees to remain in their positions or organizations while others leave. • Public employee turnover has both labor supply and labor demand dimensions, meaning that fully understanding turnover requires consideration of both the factors that aff ect employees' work decisions, such as compensation and working conditions, and the factors that aff ect organizations' staffi ng decisions, such as budget reductions and connections between performance appraisal and job dismissal. • Aside from considering supply and demand, research on teacher turnover suggests a number of other insights for investigating public employee turnover more generally, including the importance of diff erentiating mobility and attrition, of gathering data on actual turnover and not just turnover intention, and of considering a wide variety of employee and organizational factors.O ver the past few decades, researchers have built a robust literature on turnover and mobility among public school teachers. Th is research base is large enough, in fact, to have sparked both synthetic review articles and meta-analyses summarizing its fi ndings (e.g., Borman and Dowling 2008; Guarino, Santibañez, and Daley 2006). A notable feature of the development of this literature is that, despite the fact that public school teachers are the most numerous public employees, it has occurred quite apart from the growth of the public administration literature on turnover among public employees more generally. Authored primarily by researchers in the fi elds of education and economics and published in journals aimed at those audiences, teacher turnover studies rarely seem to inform (or to be informed by) research into public sector turnover. Th e failure of these two bodies of work to speak to one another is unfortunate given similarities between schools and other public organizations, between teachers and other public professionals (Lipsky 1980), and even between annual rates of employee turnover in the two areas, which recent estimates place at 13 percent to 14 percent for federal emp...

Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

“…We also included the yearly salary of each agency head as a control variable. Previous research exploring public employees' turnover decisions found that salary is an important predictor of turnover rates (Geys, Heggedal, and Sørensen ; Grissom et al ). Although we cannot control for the labor market conditions because we cannot observe the outside options of each agency head, we included the salary level as a proxy for the opportunity costs of being dismissed.…”

“…Since the continuous score is kept confidential and only the letter grades are publicly released, the discontinuities inherent in the assignment of grades offer an opportunity to investigate the impact of organizational performance on managerial turnover using a regression discontinuity design (RDD). This evidence is especially valuable given that “the dynamics of the relationship between turnover and performance remain uncertain” in public administration literature (Grissom et al , 247).…”

“…We analyze the retention or dismissal outcomes of the heads of Korean public agencies. Empirical research on managerial turnover suffers from a critical problem because of the difficulty of distinguishing between forced and voluntary departures (Grissom, Viano, and Selin ; Petrovsky et al ). In this study, we address this challenge to some extent by taking advantage of the abrupt and completely unexpected change in political leadership immediately following the impeachment of President Park Geun‐hye of Korea.…”

Not Seeing Eye to Eye on Frontline Work: Manager‐Employee Disagreement and Its Effects on Employees

“…Many of our school‐level controls, such as the percentage of low‐income students and support staff per student, are well established in the education literature as proxies for school‐level operating conditions (see, e.g., Ingersoll ), and so we expect that together they will do a reasonable job of fulfilling this purpose. At the same time, we look to the relevant theoretical and empirical literatures on employee turnover to guide our selection of school‐level controls (see, e.g., Eisenberger et al ; Fernet et al ; Grissom, Viano, and Selin ; Maslach, Schaufeli, and Leiter ). To the extent that our data allow, we have included all controls that are indicated by these literatures.…”

Drinking from the Talent Pool: A Resource Endowment Theory of Human Capital and Agency Performance

“…The recruitment and training of public employees receives perennial attention (e.g., Ballou and Podgursky ; Brewer and Selden ; Meier and Hicklin ; Rainey and Steinbauer ; Shaw ), but the human capital resource base from which agencies draw their “raw materials” remains little examined. Accordingly, Grissom, Viano, and Selin () call for more careful consideration of supply and demand conditions in public administration labor markets.…”