It is All Personal: Dealing with the revolving Door in the Indian High Tech Industry

High turnover in IT consultancy companies makes it harder to manage IT projects and increases the cost of such projects as clients demand that vendors assign more employees to each project. Current thinking, summarized in Justice Theory and related theories, suggests that labour turnover is a matter of perceived lack of fairness in pay, regulations, how employees are treated, their expectation, satisfaction, shock, and lack of embeddedness. Based on discussions with employees and CIOs and applying ideas drawn from logotherapy, this study suggests that employees are motivated also by their need to achieve meaningfulness in their work, and that this is a facilitated by their being treated as a person rather than as a resource. Survey data from IT personnel in several Indian IT outsourcing vendors support this thesis, showing also the importance of building trust in the process. Implications of the logotherapy aspect are discussed.