Turnback Intention: An Analysis of the Drivers of IT Professionals’ Intentions to Return to a Former Employer

Abstract

Recent statistics indicate that most organizations prefer to fill IT vacancies by rehiring IT professionals who previously worked in the organization. Less is known about what drives IT professionals to “turnback,” a term we define as returning to employment with a former employer. To explain this important and rarely considered IT job mobility behavior, we build on job embeddedness theory and on the concepts of shocks and job dissatisfaction from, among others, the unfolding model of voluntary turnover to develop the theory of IT professional turnback. We perform fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of data collected from 248 IT professionals to draw conclusions about the intention among IT professionals to return to work for a former employer, and develop a midrange theory. Our results reveal two configurations contributing to high turnback intention and three configurations contributing to low turnback intention. Our model distinguishes between work shocks, personal shocks, and IT work shocks. IT shocks are a new category of shocks specific to the IT profession. We contribute theoretically by theorizing a behavior relevant to IT professionals and explaining attributes driving turnback intention.