A Study on Factors Affecting Turnover Intention of IT Professionals
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Urmanov Bahromjon Urmanov Bahromjon , Shin Hoyoung , Kim Kisu 
Published: June 2018

As information technologies have become a necessary factor for the competitive advantage of most of business organizations, there is a great demand on information technology (IT) professionals. Studies show that IT professionals are more sensitive to be tired of their work than other workers or professionals. It is because dealing with information technologies is quite tiring and demands more energy and intellectual attention of the users. This factor with others mostly causes IT professionals' intention to turnover which should be controled to use them more effectively. Therefore, we need to make efforts to find main factors affecting turnover intention of IT employees to reduce the cost of losing and recruiting competent IT professionals.
Turnover creates direct recruiting and training costs for organizations. Turnover also creates indirect costs due to disruptions in organizational work processes. It is known that to replace an IT worker, an organization may spend from one to seven times the employee's annual salary. Due to high rates of turnover and associated costs, employers have shifted from perceiving IT workers as a replaceable commodity to seeing them as a valued asset. Even though several researches have been conducted in the area of turnover intention of IT and technol-ogy professionals, there are always some gaps or limitations from various aspects. As organizational utilization of information systems and technology continues to grow, the ability of an organization to retain valuable technology staff is likely to become critical factor in the attainment of strategic goals (Moore 2000). Therefore, we also purposed to conduct a research in order to learn more about the factors affecting turnover intention of IT professionals. This study investigates what kinds of factors affect turnover intention of IT professionals and finds the ways to decrease turnover intention specific to the IT professionals' situation by developing a research model and testing it empirically. The objective of this study is to understand factors affecting turnover intention of IT professionals and the mechanism of their effects on turnover intention of IT professionals. For this objective, a causal model was developed, in which work exhaustion and organizational commitment are considered as major antecedents of turnover intention of IT professionals. In turn, perceived work overload, work stress, pressure of new technology, and job autonomy are represented as the main antecedent factors affecting work exhaustion. We also consider job autonomy as an antecedent factor of both work exhaustion and organizational commitment. And as other main antecedent factors of organizational commitment, we include motivation and fairness of rewards. These factors (variables) and their relationships are derived from previous researches. The research model was tested empirically to find meaningful (significant) relationships among these variables. The findings indicate that work stress and pressure of new technology affect work exhaustion positively, and job autonomy affects work exhaustion negatively. However, perceived work overload turned out to have no significant effect on work exhaustion. Meanwhile, job autonomy, motivation, and fairness of rewards affect organizational commitment positively. Finally, work exhaustion affects turnover intention positively and organizational commitment affects turnover intention negatively. The results of this empirical study imply that organizations need to make efforts to reduce IT professionals’ work exhaustion and to increase their organizational commitment to reduce their turnover intention. In turn work stress should be reduced and job autonomy should be increased to reduce work exhaustion, which will result in decreased turnove intention.