Politics, Bureaucracy, and Employee Retention: Toward an Integrated Theory of Turnover Intent in the Federal Government

This study begins with a simple idea; if one regards the work of government as fundamentally political, why do researchers so rarely explore how that political world impacts the lives of careerists and their career decisions? So much of the research on job choices is isolated to managerial and demographic variables inside of an organization. Understanding the impact of these internal elements such as pay, mission, and relationships with coworkers are in and of themselves important for managers in building retention plans. However, this approach ignores what the open systems literature makes so clear: organizations and their operations shape and are shaped by their environment, just as people shape and are shaped by their organizations. In the process, it also ignores all that we can learn from public administration and political science literatures on relationships between agencies/individuals and political actors including the White House and appointees, Congress, and interest groups. My approach to studying turnover intent is novel in incorporating both internal and external organizational factors into an integrative theoretical framework for studying turnover intent, in deriving and testing a baker's dozen of hypotheses derived from that framework, and by "testing" and informing those findings with interviews conducted with federal employees. My study is also unique in integrating three research approaches to explore turnover intent: archival research on agency political environments; statistical analysis using logistical regression techniques of questions culled from iterations of the Federal Viewpoint (FedView) Survey between 2006 and 2012 and that prior research has found affect turnover intent by employees; and focus group and semi-structured interviews with both careerists and political actors. My analytical focus was on four agencies within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services with different responsibilities, task environments, and histories: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). My comparative agency approach is also uncommon in the literature on turnover intent, as is my focus on the perceptions of high-level career civil servants (GS 13-15). My analysis offered mixed support for the findings of prior research on turnover intent, as well as support for incorporating both internal and external factors in future research. I find that internal organizational factors partially explain decisions to change jobs. However, I also find substantive and statistically significant differences in turnover intent across the four agencies related to the stability-turbulence factors in their political environments. I also find that turnover intent needs to be explored in a more nuanced way than in prior research which treats it as a decision to stay in or leave the federal government. Specifically, it needs to be disaggregated into preferred future jobs--namely, to stay in one's job, leave the federal government entirely, or change jobs within the federal government but not leave it. In addition, the decision to leave government appears to be driven by different factors than the decision to move to other jobs within the federal government. My findings also suggest that predispositions toward turnover intent vary over time, thus calling into question static measures of variables in favor of ascertaining their cumulative effects over time or the conjuncture of different variables at different points of time. I conclude by assessing the implications of my findings for practice, future research, and theory building on turnover intent. Most significantly, the finding of environmental differences across agencies and the likelihood that they affect turnover intent directly and indirectly through their impacts on internal organizational variables begs further research. Needed are studies that test and further refine our understanding of the relationships I posit in my integrative framework, with a special focus on identifying the precise causal mechanisms involved. I offer a range of strategies for doing so that involve both quantitative and qualitative analyses, individually or jointly, and that stress the need to disaggregate turnover intent rather than treat it as solely a decision to stay in or leave the federal government. In terms of practice, I discuss the implications of the findings for future human resource management strategies, as well for the need they identify to reframe in more useful ways the "quiet crisis" arguments that have occurred since the first Volcker Commission report in the late 1980s.