Abstract:

A major challenge facing the IT services industry is the high rate of turnover among IT professionals. Skilled and talented IT professionals are assets to both vendors and clients. When they leave, loses in the forms of human, knowledge, and social capital can be so substantial that it affects the operations of both vendors and their clients.Therefore, an important agenda for vendors is to understand the factors that attract employees to continue staying with an organization so that effective retention programs can be formulated to keep best IT employees productively engaged for a long-term.This paper adapts the Job Embeddedness Model to present a framework that can be used to understand why IT professionals in vendor organizations choose to remain with their current employers. The framework captures the true nature of the operating environment where these IT professionals work – where not only are they part of vendor organizations, but they are also highly enmeshed with client organizations.