It Human Capital and the Information Systems Professional’s Decision to Leave the Company

We introduce human capital theory from Economics and place it in context with traditional approaches to the study of IT personnel turnover. Using data on 732 IT professionals, we find longstanding empirical regularities are absent from the recent data but that these irregularities may be explained by extending human capital theory to account for important characteristics of the IT professional’s job-specific IT human capital. This new theory holds up under empirical testing in which a traditional binomial logit model is adapted to include IT human capital. In addition to providing a different theoretical perspective on the determinants of IT personnel turnover and a shift in focus from intent to actual turnover behavior, this research offers researchers and senior managers an alternative approach to understanding the talented IT professionals upon which modern organizations depend.