turnover: The breakdown of Mobley's model
Below is the decision process employees go through when deciding whether to stay or leave their current job. To provide a better understanding of Mobley’s Model (1977) each stage will be individually explained and presented with an example to further demonstrate an employee’s decision process of whether to quit or stay. The boxes on the left side of each of the images below represent what the actual model said whereas the boxes on the right side are examples of that stage to better demonstrate what Mobley (1977) was describing.
Image retrieved from: http://www.generatorgroup.net/blog-page/bid/325201/Rethinking-Employee-Turnover-Why-It-s-Not-About-How-Much-But-What-Kind
The figure below represents the first stage in Mobley's model (1977) that an individual experiences in the turnover process. In this stage the employee evaluates their present job to determine if they are happy or not with what they are doing. For example, the employee would base their evaluation on factors related to the characteristics associated with their job such as their pay, their level of autonomy, how important they feel their job is etc… (Mobley, 1977).
After this evaluation if the employee feels they are actually satisfied with their current job then they will stay and their decision to quit comes to an end. However, if the employee realizes after their evaluation that they are dissatisfied with their current job then they will continue their decision to quit. Sometimes feelings of dissatisfaction can cause employees to withdraw in other ways such as putting forth less effort in their job or having frequent absences (Mobley, 1977).
Now that the employee acknowledges that they are no longer satisfied with their job they begin to consider the idea of quitting their job
An employee’s decision to quit will continue only as long as the employee feels there is a good chance of finding another job. Also, during this step, the employee will weigh the costs of leaving the company to the benefits of finding a new job. Examples of costs would be that the employee will lose their current seniority they hold or they will have to move to another location. This evaluation suggests that if an employee feels that their likelihood of finding another job is low and the costs of leaving the organization are high, that this will cause the employee to change their mind about quitting (Mobley, 1977).
However, if the employee feels that their search for a new job will be successful and that the costs of leaving the job are not that detrimental they will enter the next stage of the model. This is where the employee actually begins to start planning on searching for a new job. They may think about job head hunters they want to contact or job listing websites they are going to post their résumés on. There are others reasons why employees may want to search for a new job that has nothing to do with their current job. Instead the employee may be looking for a new job because their spouse received a promotion that requires them to move to a different state (Mobley, 1977).
After the employee makes the plan about searching for the job, the next step is to actually complete the search for new job options. This would be actually posting their résumé to job listing websites like, Monster.com, or meeting with a head hunter to have them contact other organizations about job openings (Mobley, 1977).
If after searching for new jobs the employee finds some alternatives then in the next stage of the model the employee evaluates these alternatives. The model suggests in these next two stages there are a variety of results that could occur from this evaluation process. In stage seven, the employee compares the alternatives they found against each other and see which one is their primary alternative. Next the employee compares the alternative to their current job in stage eight. From this comparison the employee may realize that the other job is not as good as it may seem and they view their present job more favorably (Mobley, 1977). Britt and Jex (2008) compared this idea to a common phrase where the employee realizes the grass is not always greener on the other side. The other potential result from this evaluation of alternatives is the employee may decide to withdraw from the labor market completely and stay at home (Mobley, 1977).
People may not quit automatically when presented with alternatives because of the attitudes they hold toward changing jobs. Also, their decision to not quit right away may be influenced by normative pressures from the social environment to stay with their current job. An example of normative influence could be the employee was raised with family members who kept the same job their whole life and based on that the employeemay feel it’s unacceptable to quit (Mobley, 1977).
The last phase is the employee actually quitting their job. This model demonstrates that sometimes employees will suddenly quit impulsively without going through the decision making process. This usually occurs because of some final situation occurs where their job dissatisfaction causes them to quit right away rather than rationalizing their decision to quit (Mobley, 1977).