Collective turnover and unit performance: The role of network contagion and knowledge diversity

As the digital transformation process deepens, turnover rates have continued to soar to new heights and renews attention to collective turnover from both academia and practitioners, increasingly studies explored the impact of collective turnover on unit performance but without a consistent conclusion. Considering the dynamic process of collective turnover and its contagion effect in the enterprise social network, based on context-emergent turnover theoretical framework and social contagion theory, we investigate the impact of human capital (i.e., knowledge diversity) and collective turnover on unit performance and the role of network contagion effect. Three years of turnover records and enterprise social network data are used to conduct empirical analysis. The results indicate that collective turnover has a significantly U-shaped impact on unit performance, while knowledge diversity and network contagion effect positively affect unit performance. Interestingly, the network contagion effect flattens the inverted U-shaped relationship between collective turnover and unit performance. In addition, peak unit performance shifts to the left-hand side of the inverted U shape when network contagion effect is added. This paper extends the context-emergent turnover theoretical framework by integrating network contagion effect and suggests managers should pay more attention to the phenomenon of turnover contagion within organizational units.