Staying or Leaving? How Job Satisfaction, Embeddedness and Antecedents Predict Turnover Intentions of Software Professionals

TL;DR

This study investigates why software professionals consider leaving by examining how job satisfaction, job embeddedness, work-life balance, and antecedents such as job quality, attitudes toward infrastructure, personality, and organizational justice relate to turnover intentions. Using a geographically diverse cross-sectional survey (N=224) and PLS-SEM with both reflective and formative constructs, the authors test 15 hypotheses and identify mediation paths. Key findings show turnover intentions are most strongly reduced by job embeddedness and, to a lesser extent, job satisfaction, with work-life balance influencing outcomes indirectly; organizational justice and job quality emerge as important antecedents via these mediators. The results offer actionable guidance for retention: enhance job quality, fairness, work-life balance, and the perceived usefulness and fairness of technical tools, to strengthen satisfaction and embeddedness among software professionals. The study advances integration of social-psychology theories with software engineering contexts and demonstrates high explanatory power for turnover intentions in this domain.

Abstract

Context: Voluntary turnover is common in the software industry, increasing recruitment and onboarding costs and the risk of losing organizational and tacit knowledge. Objective: This study investigates how job satisfaction, work-life balance, job embeddedness, and their antecedents, including job quality, personality traits, attitudes toward technical and sociotechnical infrastructure, and perceptions of organizational justice, relate to software professionals' turnover intentions. Method: We conducted a geographically diverse cross-sectional survey of software professionals (N = 224) and analyzed the data using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Our model includes both reflective and formative constructs and tests 15 hypotheses grounded in occupational psychology and software engineering literature. Results: Job satisfaction and embeddedness were significantly negatively associated with software professionals' turnover intentions, while work-life balance showed no direct effect. The strongest antecedents for job satisfaction were work-life balance and job quality, while organizational justice was the strongest predictor of job embeddedness. Discussion: The resulting PLS-SEM model has considerably higher explanatory power for key outcome variables than previous work conducted in the software development context, highlighting the importance of both psychological (e.g., job satisfaction, job embeddedness) and organizational (e.g., organizational justice, job quality) factors in understanding turnover intentions of software professionals. Our results imply that improving job satisfaction and job embeddedness is the key to retaining software professionals. In turn, enhancing job quality, supporting work-life balance, and ensuring high organizational justice can improve job satisfaction and embeddedness, indirectly reducing turnover intentions.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Significant paths (p < .05) are indicated by full lines, non-significant paths with dashed lines and non-tested lines with dotted lines.