A Study on the behavioural changes that indicate turnover of software engineers in the Sri Lankan IT industry

Abstract

Employee turnover is increasingly becoming a trending problem in most industries, which has made recruiting and retaining talented professionals is a challenging task today. Software engineer turnover rate is also of no exception and noted to be competitively higher, especially due to rising demand for software engineers within the software industry. Sri Lankan IT industry is a fast-growing major industry in Sri Lanka; thereby, demand for software engineers is also relatively high and is impacting largely on the problem of software engineer turnover. Recruiting and grooming an employee is a costly process, and employers are interested to identify turnover intention in advance to mitigate the problems arising with employee turnover. Usually, employee turnover is the result of series of dissatisfactory experiences. Attitudes can be visible through behaviour, and employees’ dissatisfaction and demotivation towards work can be visible through daily behaviour. Therefore, behavioural changes can be used to identify employees’ turnover intentions. This research was conducted as a quantitative study to identify the behavioural indicators that cause software engineers’ turnover in Sri Lankan IT industry. The main objective of this research is to provide an insight to employers in Sri Lanka who deal with software engineers to identify employee turnover intention using behavioural changes and providing highly impacted behaviours to take necessary actions to retain employees or to mitigate the problems that arising with sudden turnover of software engineers in their companies. Data was gathered using an online survey distributed among software engineers in Sri Lanka. It was identified that attendance, absenteeism, task negligence, and organizational commitment have a connection with software engineers’ turnover, while social media usage and software engineers’ turnover has no relationship. Among these indicators’, absenteeism has the highest impact; and organizational commitment, attendance and task negligence have lower impacts in the sequential order. Interestingly, organizational commitment has a negative impact on software engineer turnover, while the other three factors have an impact on software engineers’ turnover.