Stay or go?

New research indicates that societal pressure can influence employees' decisions to leave their jobs.

Money, boredom, lack of opportunity, loathsome coworkers: These are just a few of the reasons people quit their jobs. But why do people stay?

Some scholars believe it's because of "job embeddedness," the glue that binds people to their positions through job fit, relationship ties, and sacrifices that would result from leaving the position. Other scholars argue that social capital, or a strong, advantageous work-related network, can deter people from leaving the crew.

Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship Peter Hom views embeddedness and social capital as essential factors in turnover decisions, but believes normative pressure can have an impact. His recent research confirms this theory and demonstrates that the effect varies across different cultures.

Normal behavior

Normative pressure is more than social pressure, which shows up as advice, admonitions, and other forms of active influence. Normative pressure encompasses the habits and choices of those around you.

"It's the popular or expected thing to do among your neighbors or colleagues," Hom says. "People derive influence from modeling or observing others."

He notes that examining normative pressure can expand upon the employee retention insights uncovered by job embeddedness researchers, who have shown that reasons for quitting don't necessarily mirror the reasons for staying.

"They argue that there are a lot of reasons for staying that have nothing to do with leaving," Hom says.

Someone might stay in a less-than-perfect job because it offers flexibility and vacation time, while others might leave a well-loved job when a spouse finds employment out of state or a family member needs caretaking.

To explore normative pressure as a factor in quit-or-stay decisions, Hom's research combines embeddedness theories with the approach taken by social network researchers.

When embeddedness proponents examine a worker's community, they ask questions such as how many people the individual works with and how many work teams or community organizations the person belongs to.

"That focuses mostly on the quantity of your relationships, which matters," Hom says. Social network researchers also expand this to examine the structure of a person's network and the quality of the links.

Network's net worth

Social network researchers ask questions like, "Are the people you are connected with connected? Are you connected to a lot of people in high places?" Hom says. The answers determine how much social capital a network delivers, something Hom calls the reason networks matter.

"It makes a difference who your connections are," he explains. "If you're connected to a lot of senior-level executives apart from your boss, that's beneficial to your career. Being connected to high places may give you things that are not available from your boss, like visibility and political support."

Another item that builds social capital is having what Hom and other scholars call "structural holes" in your network. Holes occur when the people you're connected to don't know each other.

"When you have holes in your network, it's beneficial to your career because your contacts are more likely to supply you with novel or unique information," Hom says. "If you have a network where everyone knows each other or are friends, then the gossip they share with you is the same."

Other network factors Hom and his team examined include tie strength — whether people in the network are close friends or simply helpful coworkers — and how closely knit the network is.

"If you get a lot of resources from your networks, you invoke a reciprocity norm," Hom says. "You owe resource payback. You're indebted to them, and that might translate into greater pressure to stay."

With awareness of normative influence and social networking theory as foundations to their research, Hom and his team conducted a rare multinational turnover study. The team surveyed workers in China, Hong Kong, and the U.S. for two years and performed a statistical analysis to determine if normative influence had any impact on thoughts about quitting. It did in two of the three sites: the two collectivist societies.

Location matters

The U.S. has an individualist culture, one that prioritizes the autonomy and independence of individuals. In contrast, places like the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong, a special administrative region of the PRC, have collectivist cultures that emphasize belonging, collaboration, and harmony.

In a workplace, a collectivist approach to a team project might involve having teammates collaborate on all tasks within the project as a group. In an individualistic society, a colleague might divide a project between teammates, and each person would complete their part independently.

Prior research has found that tightly knit networks, family members working at the same workplace, and family approval are compelling drivers of quit decisions in collectivist cultures. Recognizing that social links at work are more critical for collectivists than for individuals, Hom and his colleagues correctly hypothesized that normative pressure would have a greater impact on employees in collectivist countries.

The team found that normative influence did affect quit decisions among workers in Hong Kong and the PRC, but not in the U.S. "Our findings are consistent with the idea that individuals in collectivist settings take into account the preferences of important others in their decision making… We established that normative pressures exert a unique and nontrivial impact on whether or not Chinese and Hong Kong citizens decide to leave their jobs," wrote Hom and his research colleagues in a paper outlining the study.

The team also found evidence of normative influence in the context of turnover contagion, a phenomenon in which one employee’s resignation can inspire others to follow suit. Turnover contagion aligns with the notion that normative influence stems from observing others engaging in a behavior and interpreting it as acceptable.

"You see everybody quitting, and it makes you want to quit, too," Hom says.

Again, social pressure was at work in China, as the prospect of coworker turnover prompted people to consider leaving as well. In Hong Kong, workers who watched their colleagues walk out the door felt more pressure to stay, which reduced their thoughts of quitting. In the U.S., turnover contagion wasn’t apparent, but Hom thinks the type of employees surveyed may have influenced the study's results.

The team surveyed financial representatives with a Fortune 500 financial services company, a group Hom called very independent actors. Hom said their colleagues and bosses seemed to have little influence over whether they stayed committed to the job or thought of leaving. Still, he believes people in other occupations might be more swayed by their networks, an idea that could fuel more research.

Overall, this study demonstrated that normative pressures had a significant impact, particularly among individuals in collectivist cultures.

"Embeddedness is still an important reason why people stay in their jobs, and what embeds people in their jobs is not the same across societies," Hom concludes. But he adds, "For some occupations and cultures, normative pressure may be a prominent reason why people quit."