Although voluntary turnover has been studied for over a century, existing models continue to focus on accumulating antecedents without achieving a unified explanatory framework. This study develops a process-oriented grounded theory to examine how employees experience staying or leaving as viable, necessary, or untenable options through ongoing affective and interpretive engagement with work.
This study draws on classic grounded theory and utilizes in-depth interviews with 19 French-speaking Canadian professionals from diverse organizational settings, including managers, licensed professionals, and non-managerial employees. Data analysis employed constant comparison and iterative theoretical sampling, following a reconstructive process orientation.
Stay-or-leave decisions emerge through a process termed self-integrity safety appraisal, an affect-driven mechanism by which individuals assess whether continued organizational involvement sustains the coherence and legitimacy of self. Participants responded using engagement, adaptation, and detachment strategies. Staying and leaving are shown to be context-specific means of maintaining self-integrity, rather than expressions of loyalty or disloyalty.
This study introduces self-integrity safety as an integrative appraisal mechanism that links identity, affect, and values. It reconceptualizes loyalty as fidelity to self rather than organizational attachment, and contributes to process-oriented turnover theory by showing how workplace experiences accumulate into consequential judgments about continued membership.
