The Effects of Network Groups on Minority Employee Turnover Intentions

Human Resource Management, Winter 2002, Vol. 41, No. 4, Pp. 405–421 © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/hrm.10051 Correspondence to: Raymond A. Friedman, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, 401 21st Avenue South, Nashville, TN; telephone: 615-322-3992; e-mail: [email protected] For over 30 years, U.S. companies have been concerned with retention of minority employees, initially to better comply with affirmative action requirements (Gold, 1993) and later to increase diversity (Jackson et al., 1992; Triandis, 1995). We expect that retention of minority employees is affected by all of the factors that influence retention in general, including job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and perceived availability of alternative jobs (Griffeth, Hom, & Gaertner, 2000; Maertz & Campion, 1998). In addition, however, companies have developed various programs designed to support minority employees in particular, such as mentoring programs (Thompson, DiTomaso, & Blake, 1988), compensation systems designed to reward managers who retain minority employees (Crump, 1988), and intensive training and intervention programs (Alderfer, 1992). In this article we assess the impact of one approach to supporting minority employees: minority employee “network” groups. These groups—usually initiated by the employees themselves, but supported by the company—are designed to help minority employees be better connected to each other, and thus gain greater access to information, social support, and mentoring. If network groups work as envisioned, they should help companies retain minority employees. Yet, there has been no research assessing the impact of network groups on turnover intentions of minority employees. Are all the claims made about network Raymond A. Friedman and Brooks Holtom