It Human Capital at Work: the Information Systems Professional’s Decision to Leave the Firm

We introduce human capital theory from Economics to the Information Systems (IS) literature for the study of information technology (IT)-related employment. We define IT human capital, illustrate some of its properties, and use it as a basis to construct an empirical model of decision-making for IS professionals. The model addresses whether an employee will decide to separate from the firm based on a variety of explanatory variables that were distilled from prior research and our field study of a large and diversified organization. Other relevant theory comes from the IS literature on turnover, organizational studies, industrial psychology, and strategic management. Our results indicate that important differences in employment behavior are explained by differences between IT human capital and other human capital found in less knowledge-intensive occupations. The results also can help managers in organizations that derive value from the performance of talented IS professionals to better understand the antecedents of their decisions to leave the firm.