The impact of demographic distance and network ties on individual turnover of professional employees

Sandy Bogaert, Christophe Boone and Arjen van Witteloostuijn

ACED Working Papers from University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics

Abstract: Organizational demographers found that people who are demographically different from their colleagues, are most likely to leave. To explain this fact, demography and network ties are generally treated as equivalent. Critics claim that the use of demographics as a substitute for network ties is not justified, and called for research combining both approaches. The goal of this paper is to understand the subtleties of the turnover process, by simultaneously studying the impact of demographic position and network ties on turnover of professional employees. We test our hypotheses using event history analyses on a longitudinal dataset (1994-2004) of a medium sized university faculty. Our findings indicate that demographic distance and strong external network ties have independent effects on turnover. We also found some support for interactions between demographic distance and network ties in determining individual turnover.

Keywords: Demography; Networks; Embeddedness; Turnover (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2009-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://anet.uantwerpen.be/docman/irua/6dd956/a41789c7.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ant:acedwp:2009004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ACED Working Papers from University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joeri Nys ().