The most common reason given by organisations for any employee leaving is that they found a better job for a higher salary. It is a reasonable assumption in theory: organisations can adjust financial rewards, which allows them to keep the real issue at a comfortable distance. However, studies have a much different story to tell. A large survey done in the U.S. with a population of 1000 adults who had decided to leave their companies: 52 per cent said their manager or organisation could have done something to stop them leaving.
Most employees reported that their employers had never asked whether they were satisfied with their jobs, had set goals, or were considering leaving (Gallup, 2019).
While salary is an important factor, it’s not the top reason for leaving. The more potent ones are psychological: burnout, feeling invisible, leadership deficiencies, value conflicts, and a buildup of the nonverbal message that the individual is not welcome. The article investigates research findings on the true reasons people leave the job, and what they show about what humans really want and need in their working lives.
Burnout: When the Body and Mind Refuse to Continue
Burnout is one of the most serious and under-recognised causes of employee debilitation, and is the result of a prolonged state of stress in the workplace. It may result in chronic fatigue, doubt and loss of personal effectiveness. According to the Burnout Inventory, factors that are consistently associated with the development of burnout have been identified as (Maslach and Leiter, 1997): unsustainable workload, inability to control one’s work, lack of motivation or inadequate resources, lack of community within the team, unfair treatment and values mismatch between the employee and the organisation.
If several of these are occurring at the same time and over an extended period, burnout is a foregone conclusion. Burned-out employees are more likely to leave their jobs. This was also seen in the study by Gallup (2018), which states that burned-out workers are 2.6 times more likely to be actively looking for a new job and 63 per cent more likely to take a “sick day”.
Read More: Corporate Workplace Burnout in India and What to do about it?
How Burnout Drives Employee Turnover
The real threat to organisations when they suffer from burnout is that it does not make itself known all at once. It slowly begins when a person is really committed and able to take on more and more responsibilities without complaint. When things start to escalate, it then finally hits them. When an employee thinks about their resignation when they are burned out, the damage has already been done to their well-being, their productivity and the investments made in them by the organisation. The replacement cost of an employee is consistently attributed to be anywhere from 50-200 per cent of their annual salary, including the cost of recruiting, onboarding and lost productivity (SHRM, 2022).
Burnout is rooted in a psychological process known as depletion of personal resources, which refers to a person’s energy, drive and self-efficacy for performing challenging tasks. Conservation of Resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989) suggests that people are driven to both obtain and conserve their own resources, and the sense of burnout can occur when there is a prolonged depletion of resources.
Read More: Silent Resignation: Understanding and Addressing Quiet Quitting in the Modern Workplace
Recognition and Psychological Needs
In the organisational psychology sense, it’s a reality that employees who don’t feel appreciated or valued are much more prone to depart than those who do feel appreciated and valued, no matter what their pay is. Three basic psychological needs in the workplace must be satisfied for employees to be successful, as described in Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (Deci & Ryan, 2000):
- Competence (feeling effective and capable)
- Autonomy (feeling in control and having real choice over one’s work)
- Relatedness (feeling like they belong and are valued)
How Recognition Shapes Employee Motivation
If any one of these three needs is not well met regularly, a person’s motivation may become extrinsic (for external rewards such as pay) and then non- motivational (for no rewards, neither internal nor external). Van den Broeck et al.(2016) conducted a large-scale meta-analysis that verified that satisfaction with all three SDT needs was significantly correlated with job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and intention to leave, with relatedness and competence having particularly strong correlations. All three need dimensions that are involved in recognition are:
- Acknowledgement- Praising the employee’s good work, which also meets the competence requirement.
- Autonomy– When employees are provided with meaningful input in the organisation about their work.
- Relatedness- When people feel known and cared for by their manager regarding their development.
On the other hand, workplaces that fail to provide these conditions can foster the psychological circumstances that lead employees to leave, particularly when they do not recognise employees’ work, provide little input into how work is conducted, and treat workers merely as a means to organisational ends (Gallup, 2019). The magnitude of this problem is jaw-dropping. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, only one in four workers globally is engaged in their jobs. In fact, most workers are not engaged, while some are actively disengaged, meaning they are more than simply unhappy with their work. They are actively working against their companies. According to Gallup, the cost to the world of lost productivity due to disengagement is around 8.8 trillion dollars per year.
Effects of Poor Leadership and Toxic Workplaces
People don’t quit companies. The saying “employees quit managers” is more than a cliché in the business world; research strongly supports it. Manager quality strongly influences whether employees become engaged or disengaged, accounting for at least 70 per cent of the variation (Gallup, 2015). As mentioned above, one of the best indicators of an employee staying or going is engagement.
Studies indicate that there are specific behaviours that have a negative psychological impact on employees. In organisational psychology, abusive supervision refers to sustained negative verbal and non-verbal behaviour by supervisors towards their subordinates, which can increase employees’ intentions to leave (Tepper, 2000). Poor leadership, like a manager who attributes everything to their team members, refuses to share information, plays favourites, or only rates effort through criticism, compromises psychological safety and demoralises people from performing their best.
Psychological safety, introduced by Amy Edmondson (1999) in her work on team performance, refers to a shared team belief that people can take interpersonal risks, such as asking questions, sharing ideas, admitting mistakes, or disagreeing with authority, without fear of punishment or humiliation. Edmondson’s research, as well as the later Google Project Aristotle study, found that the lack of a safe environment inhibited the very behaviours that drive team success; it has shown that not only is it not a fun place to work, it is simply not a functioning team.
Toxic Culture and Workplace Incivility
These effects become more severe in toxic workplace cultures that foster disrespect, exclusion, gossip, discrimination, and the normalisation of disrespectful behaviour between managers and employees and across the organisation. Porath and Pearson (2013) found that 48 per cent of employees who experienced workplace incivility intentionally decreased work effort, 38 per cent deliberately reduced the quality of work, and 80 per cent lost work time worrying about the incident, while 12 per cent left the job as a result. Incivility is no annoyance. It drives disengagement and turnover, and even witnessing workplace incivility can be deeply harmful.
An additional and growing reason for employee attrition is values misalignment. Cable and Edwards (2004) previously found that poor person-organisation fit is related to decreased satisfaction, commitment, and intention to leave. Person-organisation fit refers to the extent to which an employee’s values, goals, and personality match those of the organisation. This increasing focus on organisational purpose, ethical conduct, and social responsibility also puts employers at risk of losing workers. Younger generations seek to know how much an employer values its employees and the community (Twenge, 2017).
Conclusion
The facts show that most employees do not leave their jobs simply because another employer offers them higher compensation. But they quit because they are exhausted and feel that nobody cares about them. They exit due to the lack of recognition of their work and the feeling of invisibility. Also, they depart because of an unsafe, demeaning, or meaningless workplace environment created by their manager. They leave when the organization’s values don’t match its actions.
This goes beyond salary benchmarking and has real-world implications. At its core, retention is a psychological issue. It depends on whether people feel that their work meets both their basic human needs and their basic psychological needs. Companies that are aware of this invest not just in their compensation packages. But it also lies in the quality of their managers. Organisations reflect these qualities through their cultures of psychological safety, recognition, workload management, and the alignment between their values and culture. Getting it right will cost a lot of money. Organisations lose employees, face disengagement, and suffer damage to their reputation.
References +
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- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The ‘what’ and ‘why’ of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behaviour. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
- Gallup. (2015). State of the American manager: Analytics and advice for leaders. https://www.gallup.com/services/182138/state-american-manager.aspx
- Gallup. (2018). Employee burnout: Causes and cures. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/282659/employee-burnout-causes-cures-blinded-landing.aspx
- Gallup. (2019). This fixable problem costs U.S. businesses $1 trillion. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/247391/fixable-problem-costs-businesses-trillion.aspx
- Gallup. (2023). State of the global workplace: 2023 report. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
- Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualising stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.3.513
- Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (1997). The truth about burnout: How organisations cause personal stress and what to do about it. Jossey-Bass.
- Porath, C., & Pearson, C. (2013). The price of incivility. Harvard Business Review, 91(1–2), 115–121.
- Society for Human Resource Management. (2022). Understanding the true cost of employee turnover. SHRM Foundation. https://www.shrm.org
- Tepper, B. J. (2000). Consequences of abusive supervision. Academy of Management Journal, 43(2), 178–190. https://doi.org/10.2307/1556375
- Twenge, J. M. (2017). iGen: Why today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy — and completely unprepared for adulthood. Atria Books.
- Van den Broeck, A., Ferris, D. L., Chang, C. H., & Rosen, C. C. (2016). A review of self-determination theory’s basic psychological needs at work. Journal of Management, 42(5), 1195–1229. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206316632058
