Social Relationships and Turnover: A Multidisciplinary Review and Integration

Abstract

Although there has been a notable increase in research on the effect of social relationships on turnover across different disciplines, including management, sociology, communication, applied psychology, corporate strategy, and economics over the past two decades, this stream of research has not been complied into a thorough and theoretically insightful review. In this article, we review and integrate the literature on social relationships and turnover by (a) defining social relationships broadly; (b) taking an interdisciplinary approach; (c) examining relational components embedded in turnover theories; (d) summarizing findings on the association between behavioral, structural, and psychological features of social relationships and turnover; (e) explaining how the findings can contribute to extant turnover theories; (f) discussing operationalizations of social relationships; (g) identifying limitations of prior research and theories; and (h) providing directions for future research. Our review charts what is known and unknown about the association between social relationships and turnover with the goal of laying out a path for moving forward.