Employee Turnover and Organizational Performance: Testing a Hypothesis from Classical Public Administration

Empirical studies of public employee turnover, particularly using turnover as an independent variable, are rare; and most of the literature assumes turnover to have a negative impact on organizations. This study examines a provocative but little supported hypothesis that has recently emerged in the private sector literature—that turnover may provide positive benefits to the organization, at least up to a point. Using data from several hundred public organizations over a nine-year period, we test the proposition that moderate levels of turnover may positively affect organizational performance. We find that while turnover is indeed negatively related to performance for the organization’s primary goal, it does have the hypothesized nonlinear relationship for a secondary output that is characterized by greater task difficulty. Employee turnover is a neglected topic in public administration (Selden and Moynihan 2000, 74). One of the leading public personnel texts devotes only a single brief mention to turnover in reference to the Volcker Commission Report (Nigro, Nigro, and Kellough 2007, 43) and another does not mention it at all (Dresang 1999). A search of the JSTOR archives for Public Administration Review and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory finds a total of only five articles since 1980 (Clingermayer and Feiock 1997; Lewis 1991; Lewis and Durst 1995; Romzek 1990; Wilson 1994). Although an electronic search of the Review of Public Personnel Administration found 34 articles that mentioned the word ‘‘turnover’’ anywhere in the manuscript, most merely mentioned the term as an aside or in the bibliography (exceptions were Coursey 2005; Jamison 2003; Kellough and Nigro 2002; Lan, Riley, and Cayer 2005; Lewis and Hu 2005). This relatively low level of attention is surprising because turnover requires organizations to devote substantial resources to replacing workers (Griffith and Horn 2001, 2; Wright and Kim 2004, 19) and because high levels of turnover might indicate a significant We would like to thank Hal Rainey, J. Edward Kellough, and Rene Rocha for their assistance on this project and Paul P. Van Riper for access to his personal library. Address correspondence to the author at [email protected]. doi:10.1093/jopart/mum028 Advance Access publication on October 4, 2007 a The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] JPART 18:573–590