A DYNAMIC MODEL OF JOB SATISFACTION AND TURNOVER: FRAMEWORK FOR MODEL DEVELOPMENT AND SIMULATION

摘要

Employee retention has become an increasing focus in engineering management, as corporations have begun to recognize the value of people as individuals, as well as the value of their cumulative knowledge and skills. Although a substantial amount of study and investment has been done in order to measure and predict the causes of voluntary employee turnover, there still remains a high variability in predicting patterns of workforce behavior across various industries. For example, some companies have found the existence of amenities such as gyms or internet cafes tend to increase job satisfaction; however, the effects can be short term and the next hired "generation" might not find the amenities provided as attractive. Hence, the ability to maintain and encourage employee loyalty is rooted in the understanding of the complex system of factors that affect their decisions. The ability to capture these factors and their behaviors will be critical to future development of engineering management approaches in support of employee retention. Visual representations of changes over time can be especially valuable to decision makers. The objective of this study is to develop a robust dynamic model that can represent and anticipate changes in employee job satisfaction and turnover rate through the use of system dynamics methods. Statistically significant parameters are selected and then varied to observe their effects on the behaviors of the main variables. Conclusions are drawn to provide decision support to management toward the goal of employee retention.