Antecedents to IT personnel's intentions to leave: A systematic literature review

This paper undertakes a systematic review to gain insight into existing studies on the turnover of information technology (IT) personnel. Our systematic review of 72 studies from 1980 to 2008 examines the background and trend of research into IT personnel's intentions to leave their workplaces, in addition to providing a taxonomy of the determinants of their intentions to quit as captured in IT literature. We note a huge growth in the number of academic papers on the topic since 1998. Moreover, most of the research on IT turnover has been undertaken in North America, followed by Asia. Based on the 72 extracted studies, we found a total of 70 conceptually distinct IT turnover drivers. We classified them into the 5 broad categories of individual, organisational, job-related, psychological, and environmental, each containing three to four sub-categories. Finally, this paper presents insightful recommendations for IT practitioners as well as for the research community.