Outcomes of intention to quit of Indian IT professionals

Intention to quit has been getting attention in the context of employee attrition, with focus on its antecedents. A related aspect that needs attention is the outcome of intention to quit, where little research has occurred, especially in the Indian context. The present study explores performance orientation, organizational deviance, and organizational citizenship behavior as outcomes of intention to quit of Indian IT professionals. These factors become critical in the context of human resource management because employees who want to quit may become less productive or even dysfunctional for the organization. Interviews and a questionnaire‐based survey were used in this research. The survey was conducted using software professionals with work experience of less than four years, with the results based on 533 responses. The initial results show that as hypothesized, intention to quit does lead to less performance orientation, higher organizational deviance, and less organizational citizenship behavior. Further, exploration using structural equation modeling shows that performance orientation mediates the relationships between intention to quit and organizational citizenship behavior as well as between intention to quit and organizational deviance. This study's findings imply that organizations need to understand that employees with a high intention to quit can prove costly from multiple dimensions. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.