The impact of demographic distance and network ties on individual turnover of professional employees

Organizational demographers found that people who are demographically different from their colleagues, are most likely to leave. To explain this fact, demography and network ties are generally treated as equivalent. Critics claim that the use of demographics as a substitute for network ties is not justified, and called for research combining both approaches. The goal of this paper is to understand the subtleties of the turnover process, by simultaneously studying the impact of demographic position and network ties on turnover of professional employees. We test our hypotheses using event history analyses on a longitudinal dataset (1994-2004) of a medium sized university faculty. Our findings indicate that demographic distance and strong external network ties have independent effects on turnover. We also found some support for interactions between demographic distance and network ties in determining individual turnover.