Employee Turnover Impact in Organizational Knowledge Management: The Portuguese Real Estate Case

Organizations make large investment on their employees concerning the training, developing, maintaining and the efforts to retaining them. Employee turnover is one of the most important issues to organizations, and one that needs special attention. This problem is even more relevant when business processes are less depending from machinery and heavily rely on human relationships, being real estate business one such good example. With the globalization phenomena, greater competition and economic crises, real estate organizations must provide and constantly innovate services which are based on strategies created by employees. Knowledge must be retained, in a way that it can be stored and disseminated through the organization. This paper examines the impact of employee turnover, and proposes a conceptual model based on a knowledge management approach supported by information and communication technologies on how to minimize the impact of employee turnover in organizations. The research used Grounded Theory to inform the model.