Employee-Organization Exchange Relationships, HRM Practices, and Quit Rates of Good and Poor Performers

We developed and tested an exchange-theory-based extension of the relationship between human resource management (HRM) practices and quit rates in a two-wave trucking industry study and attempted a constructive replication in a two-wave study of supermarkets. We found that HRM inducements and investments relate negatively to good- and poor-performer quit rates, whereas expectation-enhancing practices relate negatively to good-performer quit rates and positively to poor-performer quit rates. We find support for the predictions that expectation-enhancing practices attenuate the negative relationship between inducements and investments and goodperformer quit rates (Study 1) and exacerbate the negative relationship with poorperformer quit rates (Study 2). Researchers have historically viewed the question of why people quit in terms of several individual bases for turnover (see Maertz and Griffeth [2004] for a review), but in the last ten years the outlook has shifted toward an organization-level view of the phenomenon based on human resource management (HRM) systems. High turnover rates have deleterious effects on outcomes such as productivity and safety in manufacturing and transportation (Shaw, Gupta, & Delery, 2005), sales performance in customer service industries (Batt, 2002; Kacmar, Andrews, Van Rooy, Steilberg, &

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