This study draws on distributive justice, human capital, and stigmatization theories to hypothesize relationships between relative pay gap and patterns of job mobility. Our study also expands the criterion space of job mobility by contrasting different job destinations when information technology (IT) professionals make job moves. We examine three job moves: (a) turnover to another IT job in a different firm, (b) turnaway-within to a non-IT job, and (c) turnaway-between to a different firm and a non-IT job. We analyze work histories spanning 28 years for 359 IT professionals drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We report three major findings. First, as hypothesized, larger relative pay gaps significantly increase the likelihood of job mobility. Second, IT males and IT females have different job mobility patterns. IT males are more likely to turn over than turn away-between when faced with a relative pay gap. Further, and contrary to predictions from human capital theory, IT males are more likely to turn away-within than turn over. This surprising finding suggests that the ubiquitous use of IT in other business functions may have increased the value of IT skills for non-IT jobs and reduced the friction of moving from IT to other non-IT positions. Third, and consistent with stigmatization arguments, IT females are more likely to turn away from IT than to turn over when faced with a relative pay gap. In fact, to reduce relative pay gaps, IT females tend to take on lower-status jobs that pay less than their IT jobs. We conclude this study with important theoretical, practical, and policy implications.
This paper examines the objective career histories, mobility patterns, and career success of 500 individuals drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), who had worked in the information technology workforce. Sequence analysis of career histories shows that careers of the IT workforce are more diverse than the traditional view of a dual IT career path (technical versus managerial). This study reveals a new career typology comprising three broad, distinct paths: IT careers; professional labor market (PLM)careers; and secondary labor market (SLM) careers. Of the 500 individuals in the IT workforce, 173 individuals pursued IT careers while the remaining 327 individuals left IT for other high-status non-IT professional jobs in PLM or lower-status, non-IT jobs in SLM careers. Findings from this study contribute to refining the concept of "boundaryless" careers. By tracing the diverse trajectories of career mobility, we enrich our understanding of how individuals construct boundaryless careers that span not only organizational but also occupational boundaries. Career success did not differ in terms of average pay for individuals in IT and PLM careers. By contrast, individuals in SLM careers attained the lowest pay. We conclude this study with implications for future research and for the management of IT professionals' careers
This study combines a narrative review with meta-analytic techniques to yield important insights about the existing research on turnover of information technology professionals. Our narrative review of 33 studies shows that the 43 antecedents to turnover intentions of IT professionals could be mapped onto March and Simon's (1958) distal-proximal turnover framework. Our meta-analytic structural equation modeling shows that proximal constructs of job satisfaction (reflecting the lack of desire to move) and perceived job alternatives (reflecting ease of movement) partially mediate the relationships between the more distal individual attributes, job-related and perceived organizational factors, and IT turnover intentions. Building on the findings from our review, we propose a new theoretical model of IT turnover that presents propositions for future research to address existing gaps in the IT literature.