Five Degrees of Separation: A Human Capital Model of Employment-Related Decisionmaking in the Information Technology Workforce

Successful implementation of information technology (IT)-enabled strategy rests on the performance of IT professionals. Consequently, the development and retention of this “IT human capital” has become a critical issue for many organizations. In this paper, we introduce the relevance of human capital theory from economics to the information systems (IS) literature for the study of turnover. We also present a new model for employee separation decisionmaking and empirical results from an exploratory study of separation and turnover in the IT work force at a large diversified firm. Our modeling perspective is based on five categories of explanatory variables derived from multiple theoretical bases, including IS, organizational studies, industrial psychology, and the resource view of the firm from the strategic management literature. Our preliminary empirical results support a set of propositions motivated by human capital theory that indicate ways in which IT human capital may be different from human capital in other less knowledge-intensive and less dynamic occupational contexts.