Quitting Is Contagious: How Turnover Contagion Spreads Through Teams and What Leaders Can Do About It
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Abstract: This article examines the phenomenon of turnover contagion—the process by which employees' decisions to leave an organization spread to and influence the quitting behavior of their coworkers. Drawing on the foundational research of Felps et al. (2009), which demonstrated that coworkers' job embeddedness and job search behaviors predict individual voluntary turnover above and beyond traditional attitudinal predictors, this article translates meso-level turnover theory into practical organizational guidance. The discussion synthesizes social comparison theory, job embeddedness theory, and contemporary workforce data to explain why turnover cascades through work groups and what organizational leaders can do to interrupt the cycle. Five evidence-based intervention strategies are presented—spanning embeddedness-building, socialization design, managerial capability development, stay conversation practices, and team composition management—each illustrated with organizational examples. The article concludes with a forward-looking framework for building long-term retention resilience in an era of persistent engagement decline and evolving employee expectations.
When a valued colleague announces they are leaving, the reaction in most workplaces is predictable: a surge of well-wishes, some genuine sadness—and, quietly, a wave of introspection. If she's leaving, should I be looking too? That question, unremarkable as it sounds, is the opening act of a phenomenon researchers call turnover contagion: the process by which one person's departure or job search behavior influences others in the same work group to consider quitting themselves (Felps et al., 2009).
For most of the past half-century, management scholars treated voluntary turnover as an intensely individual decision. The dominant models traced a clean, linear path: low job satisfaction or weak organizational commitment produces thoughts of leaving, which lead to a job search, which leads to an exit (March & Simon, 1958; Mobley, 1977; Price & Mueller, 1986). Those models were useful, but they were also incomplete. As Pfeffer observed, "virtually all of the dominant models of turnover conceptualize it as an individual decision, without considering the effect of social structure" (1991, p. 795). The social environment in which an employee works—who their coworkers are, how embedded those coworkers feel, and what leaving-related behaviors those coworkers display—was largely absent from the picture.
That blind spot matters enormously today. The years since 2020 have brought unprecedented turbulence to labor markets worldwide. More than 24 million American workers left their jobs between April and September 2021 alone, a period widely labeled the "Great Resignation" (Sull et al., 2022). As the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) documented, workers who quit during that period were significantly more likely to report being influenced by watching coworkers resign and by media narratives about quitting than workers who had left in earlier periods (Rouvalis, 2022). Meanwhile, Gallup's global engagement data show that only 21% of employees worldwide were engaged in 2024, down from a record 23% in 2022, and that U.S. engagement hit a decade low of 31% in both 2024 and 2025 (Gallup, 2025). In such a landscape, the social dynamics of quitting are not merely an academic curiosity—they are a strategic imperative. Understanding how and why turnover spreads through teams gives leaders a meaningful lever for protecting organizational capability and performance.
This article brings the science of turnover contagion to practitioners. It unpacks the theoretical and empirical foundations, quantifies the organizational and individual consequences, presents evidence-based interventions, and offers a forward-looking framework for building long-term retention resilience.
The Turnover Contagion Landscape
Defining Turnover Contagion and Job Embeddedness
Turnover contagion refers to "the transmission of [an employee's] intention to leave to people around them" through social processes within the workplace (Felps et al., 2009, p. 546). The metaphor draws deliberately from epidemiology: like an illness, the propensity to leave can be transmitted from one individual to another, spreading through a work group via observation, conversation, and social comparison. The "something" being transmitted is not a pathogen, of course, but rather an increased willingness to consider quitting as a viable and perhaps even attractive option.
The concept of job embeddedness is central to understanding what makes teams susceptible to—or resilient against—this contagion. First introduced by Mitchell et al. (2001), job embeddedness describes the collection of forces that keep an employee in a job. It includes three dimensions, each operating both on the job and in the community:
Fit: How well an employee's personal values, career goals, and skills align with the demands and culture of the job and the attractiveness of the surrounding community.
Links: The formal and informal connections an employee has with other people, teams, and institutions in the organization and community.
Sacrifice: What an employee would give up—materially, psychologically, and socially—if they left their job or community.
A highly embedded employee is, metaphorically, stuck in a web of connections, investments, and alignment that makes leaving costly and unattractive (Mitchell et al., 2001). Crucially, job embeddedness predicts turnover above and beyond the traditional attitudinal variables of job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Crossley et al., 2007; Lee et al., 2004; Mitchell et al., 2001). It captures nonaffective elements—owning a home nearby, having children in local schools, holding stock options that vest over time—that have nothing to do with whether a person likes their job but everything to do with whether they leave it.
The State of the Evidence: How Contagion Operates
The empirical case for turnover contagion rests on several converging lines of evidence. The foundational study, published by Felps et al. (2009) in the Academy of Management Journal, tested the contagion model across two large samples: 1,038 departments in a national hospitality company (roughly 8,663 employees) and 45 branches of a Midwestern retail bank (234 employees). Using multilevel logistic regression (hierarchical generalized linear modeling), the researchers demonstrated that coworkers' average job embeddedness predicted whether a focal employee voluntarily left—even after controlling for the focal employee's own embeddedness, satisfaction, commitment, demographics, department size, and local unemployment rate (Felps et al., 2009).
The effect sizes were substantial. A one standard deviation increase in coworkers' job embeddedness was associated with a decrease in the probability of individual turnover from 15.4% to 8.5% per year in the hospitality sample and from 12.9% to 4.2% per year in the bank sample (Felps et al., 2009). In the banking sample, coworkers' job search behavior—measured with the Job Search Behavior Index (Kopelman et al., 1992)—mediated the relationship between coworkers' embeddedness and individual turnover. In other words, low group embeddedness predicted more visible job-searching among coworkers, and that visible searching predicted whether a given individual left.
The mechanism underlying these effects is rooted in social comparison theory. Festinger (1954) established that people compare themselves to others, especially in novel, risky, or ambiguous situations. Changing jobs is precisely such a situation—filled with uncertainty about whether the grass is truly greener, whether the risk is worth it, whether the timing is right (Steel, 2002). When coworkers are observed updating résumés, scheduling interviews, or openly discussing alternative employers, they provide social proof that leaving is both feasible and acceptable. As Chartrand and Bargh noted, "the act of perceiving another person's behavior creates a tendency to behave similarly oneself" (1999, p. 813).
Subsequent research has reinforced and extended these findings. Krackhardt and Porter (1985, 1986) demonstrated a "snowball effect" in which turnover clustered within communication networks, with departures concentrated among employees who shared close network ties. Bartunek et al. (2008) documented how collective norms about the legitimacy of leaving can develop within work groups, further amplifying the social transmission of turnover propensity. And Eder and Eisenberger (2008) showed that group-level withdrawal behaviors—such as tardiness and undeserved breaks—spill over to influence individual withdrawal, establishing a broader pattern that extends well beyond turnover itself.
Organizational and Individual Consequences of Turnover Contagion
Organizational Performance Impacts
The costs of employee turnover are well documented and substantial. Estimates vary by role and industry, but replacement costs typically range from 50% to 200% of an employee's annual salary, according to SHRM (as cited in Stealthagents, 2026). Gallup has estimated that voluntary turnover costs U.S. businesses approximately $1 trillion annually (Gallup, 2023). These figures include direct costs—recruiting, hiring, and training—as well as the harder-to-measure losses in productivity, institutional knowledge, and team cohesion.
But these per-departure cost figures dramatically understate the true impact when turnover contagion is at work. A single departure may be absorbable. Three departures within the same team over 90 days—triggered by a contagion cascade—can be devastating. The Felps et al. (2009) data suggest that contagion effects are particularly potent in smaller, more self-contained teams: the bank branch results were stronger than the hospitality department results, likely because employees in the small branches had more concentrated exposure to their coworkers' leaving behaviors.
Research by Shaw et al. (2005) has shown that voluntary turnover is negatively related to organizational performance, with Hatch and Dyer summarizing that "firms with high turnover significantly under-perform their rivals" (2004, p. 1155). When turnover is contagious, it is not merely additive but compounding: each departure increases the leaving propensity of those who remain, producing a destructive feedback loop that can hollow out entire teams.
Additionally, the disruption extends beyond the departing employees themselves. Krackhardt and Porter (1985) found that turnover affects the attitudes of stayers, not just leavers—colleagues who remain behind often report decreased satisfaction and increased intentions to leave, especially when those who depart occupied central roles in social networks. This ripple effect means that even departments that do not lose additional headcount may suffer declines in morale, collaboration, and discretionary effort.
Individual and Team-Level Wellbeing Impacts
From the perspective of individual employees, working in a low-embeddedness environment carries its own costs—even for those who do not ultimately leave. When coworkers are visibly disengaged or actively searching for other jobs, the resulting social climate tends to be one of uncertainty and eroded psychological safety. Bakker and Schaufeli (2000) demonstrated that burnout spreads through social contagion processes similar to those observed in turnover, suggesting that the social transmission of withdrawal attitudes can undermine wellbeing even before it produces actual departures.
For managers, the consequences are equally taxing. Every departure triggers a cascade of administrative, operational, and relational work: redistributing tasks, onboarding replacements, maintaining client or customer relationships, and attempting to stabilize remaining team members' morale. In industries with high customer contact—hospitality, banking, healthcare—turnover contagion can degrade service quality, damage client trust, and create a vicious cycle in which departures lead to heavier workloads for remaining employees, which accelerates further departures.
Evidence-Based Organizational Responses
Table 1: Evidence-Based Strategies to Counter Turnover Contagion
Intervention Strategy | Primary Focus Area | Actionable Practices | Organizational Example | Underlying Theory or Mechanism |
Building On-the-Job Embeddedness Through Fit, Links, and Sacrifice | Increasing overall team-wide embeddedness across fit, links, and sacrifice dimensions. | Enhancing organizational fit (designing roles to leverage skills and revisiting assignments), deepening interpersonal links (cross-functional project teams, mentorship programs, cohort professional development), increasing organizational sacrifice (deferred compensation, tuition reimbursement, sabbatical eligibility, tenure-rewarding career paths), and strengthening community embeddedness (volunteer programs, local hiring, homeownership assistance). | SAS Institute | Job Embeddedness Theory (Mitchell et al., 2001) and turnover contagion research (Felps et al., 2009), which demonstrate that coworkers' aggregate embeddedness reduces individual turnover probability by raising the costs/sacrifices of departure and strengthening connections. |
Designing Collective Socialization Experiences | Onboarding practices that build individual embeddedness and a supportive group-level embeddedness climate for newcomers. | Cohort-based onboarding, structured mentorship pairing with highly embedded mentors, role clarity programs with explicit expectation setting, and 90-day check-in cadences (30, 60, and 90 days). | Zappos | Collective socialization tactics research (Allen, 2006) and Job Embeddedness Theory, which show that collective learning experiences build newcomers' fit and links while creating a buffer against contagion. |
Equipping Managers to Monitor and Respond to Team Embeddedness | Managerial capability in monitoring and managing retention and embeddedness at the team level. | Team-level embeddedness diagnostics (periodic pulse surveys), manager training on contagion dynamics and early warning signs, proactive stay conversations/interviews, and post-departure stabilization protocols. | Deloitte | Team-level turnover risk dynamics (Felps et al., 2009) and Perceived Organizational/Supervisor Support models (Maertz et al., 2007), which emphasize that supervisor support drives retention and that manager intervention mitigates team-wide contagion. |
Disrupting the Visibility of Job Search Behaviors | Dampening contagion spread by reducing the visibility and social normalization of job search behaviors within work groups. | Establishing constructive communication norms (skip-level meetings, anonymous feedback platforms, town halls), reducing ambient uncertainty through transparent leadership communication, and counterbalancing negative social proof by celebrating tenure milestones and sharing internal mobility stories. | Southwest Airlines | Social Comparison Theory (Festinger, 1954), the perception-behavior link (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), and the Job Search Behavior Index mediation mechanism (Felps et al., 2009; Kopelman et al., 1992). |
Strengthening Community Embeddedness for Distributed and Hybrid Teams | Fostering embeddedness and counteracting digital turnover contagion in remote or hybrid environments. | Intentional virtual community building (synchronous rituals, virtual coffee chats, retrospectives), location-based hiring and retention incentives, and remote-specific embeddedness tactics (sponsoring charitable activities, flexible schedules for local community involvement). | GitLab | Job Embeddedness Theory applied to remote workforces (Holtom et al., 2006; Felps et al., 2009), maintaining interpersonal links and fit across distributed digital communication channels. |
The research on turnover contagion suggests that effective retention strategies must operate at the team and organizational level, not merely at the individual level. Below, five evidence-based intervention strategies are explored, each grounded in the mechanisms identified by Felps et al. (2009) and the broader embeddedness literature.
Building On-the-Job Embeddedness Through Fit, Links, and Sacrifice
The most direct route to interrupting turnover contagion is to increase the overall embeddedness of teams—not just of individuals identified as flight risks. Because coworkers' aggregate embeddedness influences every individual's turnover probability, investments in team-wide embeddedness pay dividends that extend far beyond any single employee (Felps et al., 2009; Mitchell et al., 2001).
Effective approaches include:
Enhancing organizational fit: Ensure that roles are designed to leverage employees' skills and talents. Regularly revisit role assignments to maintain alignment as both organizational needs and employee capabilities evolve.
Deepening interpersonal links: Invest in team-building that creates genuine professional relationships, not merely superficial socializing. Cross-functional project teams, mentorship programs, and cohort-based professional development all create ties that increase the cost of leaving.
Increasing organizational sacrifice: Offer benefits that vest or appreciate over time—deferred compensation, tuition reimbursement with service agreements, sabbatical eligibility tied to tenure, or career-pathing programs that reward long-term commitment.
Strengthening community embeddedness: Support employees' connections to the local community through volunteer programs, local hiring preferences, and homeownership assistance.
SAS Institute has been widely cited for its approach to building deep organizational embeddedness. The analytics software company, headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, has long maintained an expansive on-campus ecosystem—including childcare, healthcare, fitness centers, and recreational facilities—that increases both organizational and community sacrifice for employees who might consider leaving. SAS has consistently reported voluntary turnover rates far below industry averages. While no single perk drives retention, the cumulative effect of these investments is to create a web of connections and benefits that substantially raises the cost of departure—precisely the mechanism that job embeddedness theory describes (Mitchell et al., 2001).
Designing Collective Socialization Experiences
Allen (2006) demonstrated that collective socialization tactics—onboarding practices in which newcomers experience common learning experiences as part of a group or cohort—increase job embeddedness and reduce turnover. This finding has particular relevance for turnover contagion because collective socialization simultaneously builds individual embeddedness (increasing each newcomer's fit and links) and shapes the group-level embeddedness climate that Felps et al. (2009) identified as the key group-level predictor.
Effective approaches include:
Cohort-based onboarding: Structure new hire orientation around learning cohorts rather than isolated individual starts. Shared experiences create bonds and a common organizational narrative.
Structured mentorship pairing: Assign newcomers to embedded mentors—employees who score highly on fit, links, and sacrifice dimensions—to accelerate the newcomer's integration and social network development.
Role clarity programs: Given that Gallup's engagement data show "clarity of expectations" as one of the most sharply declining engagement elements since 2020 (Gallup, 2025), onboarding programs should prioritize explicit communication about role expectations, performance standards, and advancement criteria.
90-day check-in cadences: Establish structured touchpoints at 30, 60, and 90 days to identify early signs of poor fit or disengagement before they spread to others.
Zappos, the online retailer now part of Amazon, became well known for an intensive onboarding process that immersed all new hires—regardless of role—in the company's culture, customer service philosophy, and operational realities. Notably, Zappos offered new hires a cash bonus to quit during onboarding (sometimes called "The Offer"), reasoning that employees who self-selected to stay after experiencing the culture would be more deeply embedded from the outset. While the specific practice has evolved, the underlying principle aligns directly with embeddedness theory: onboarding should enhance fit and deepen links, so that the resulting group-level embeddedness provides a buffer against future contagion.
Equipping Managers to Monitor and Respond to Team Embeddedness
One of the most actionable implications of the Felps et al. (2009) research is that managers should track embeddedness and turnover risk at the team level, not just the individual level. A manager who focuses exclusively on retaining the single most valued employee may miss the more dangerous dynamic: a gradual erosion of team-wide embeddedness that creates fertile ground for contagion.
Effective approaches include:
Team-level embeddedness diagnostics: Implement periodic pulse surveys that assess embeddedness dimensions (fit, links, and sacrifice) at the team level. Flag teams where aggregate embeddedness is declining, even if no individual has expressed intent to leave.
Manager training on contagion dynamics: Educate frontline and mid-level managers on how turnover spreads through social comparison. Help them recognize early warning signs—increased talk about competitors' compensation, visible job search activity, clustering of departures within network groups.
Proactive stay conversations: Train managers to conduct "stay interviews" (as distinct from exit interviews) to understand what keeps each team member in the role and what might cause them to leave. When conducted across an entire team, these conversations provide a real-time map of embeddedness strengths and vulnerabilities.
Post-departure stabilization protocols: When a team member does leave, equip managers with a structured response plan: transparent communication about the departure, redistribution of workload, accelerated backfill, and deliberate check-ins with remaining team members to assess and address any shift in attitudes.
Deloitte has invested heavily in managerial capability around retention and team health. The professional services firm developed an approach it describes as "irresistible organization" design, centered on meaningful work, supportive management, and growth opportunities (Bersin, 2015). Importantly, Deloitte's retention approach includes regular team health assessments and empowers managers to act on team-level data rather than relying solely on annual engagement surveys that arrive too late to prevent contagion cascades. The approach recognizes that perceived organizational support and perceived supervisor support are both significant predictors of embeddedness and retention (Maertz et al., 2007).
Disrupting the Visibility of Job Search Behaviors
The Felps et al. (2009) mediation analysis revealed that coworkers' job search behaviors—reading classifieds, revising résumés, scheduling interviews, and talking about alternative employers—serve as the critical mechanism through which low embeddedness translates into contagion. This finding suggests that reducing the visibility and social normalization of job search behaviors within the workplace can dampen contagion spread.
Effective approaches include:
Establishing constructive communication norms: Rather than attempting to suppress discussion of dissatisfaction (which risks provoking reactance), create channels for employees to voice concerns productively—through skip-level meetings, anonymous feedback platforms, or regular town halls where leadership addresses frustrations candidly.
Reducing ambient uncertainty: Transparent communication about organizational strategy, financial health, and future direction reduces the ambiguity that drives social comparison. When employees feel informed, they are less likely to rely on coworkers' job-searching as a proxy signal for whether they, too, should be looking.
Counterbalancing negative social proof: Actively communicate reasons people stay. Celebrate tenure milestones, highlight internal mobility stories, and give voice to employees who have chosen to stay and are thriving. These narratives create positive social proof that staying is the default—not the exception.
Southwest Airlines has long cultivated a workplace culture that normalizes staying and celebrating tenure. The airline's public recognition programs, internal career mobility pipelines, and cultural emphasis on belonging create what embeddedness theory would describe as a high-links, high-fit social environment. Employees who feel deeply connected to the organizational culture and to one another are less likely to broadcast leaving signals—and their colleagues are less likely to interpret the ambient social environment as one where leaving is normative.
Strengthening Community Embeddedness for Distributed and Hybrid Teams
The Felps et al. (2009) research was conducted in settings where coworkers shared physical space—bank branches and hospitality departments. In today's increasingly remote and hybrid work environments, the dynamics of turnover contagion may operate differently but are no less real. Digital communication channels—Slack, Teams, email—can transmit job search signals rapidly and widely, potentially amplifying contagion beyond the boundaries of a single physical location.
Effective approaches include:
Intentional virtual community building: For distributed teams, invest in regular synchronous rituals—virtual coffee chats, team retrospectives, collaborative problem-solving sessions—that build interpersonal links even in the absence of physical co-location.
Location-based hiring and retention strategies: Where possible, hire from communities near physical offices and provide incentives for local engagement—community service days, local professional association memberships, and homeownership or relocation support (Holtom et al., 2006).
Remote-specific embeddedness tactics: For fully remote employees, community embeddedness may be less tied to the employer's physical location and more tied to the employee's personal community. Support community engagement broadly—sponsor charitable activities, offer flexible schedules that allow community participation—to deepen off-the-job embeddedness that serves as a retention anchor.
GitLab, one of the world's largest all-remote companies, has been notably intentional about building embeddedness in the absence of physical offices. The company's publicly documented handbook codifies cultural norms, communication expectations, and community-building rituals for a workforce spread across dozens of countries. GitLab invests in regional meetups, virtual social events, and stipends for coworking spaces—all of which create links and fit that increase the cost of leaving, even for employees who have never set foot in a company office.
Building Long-Term Retention Resilience
The interventions described above address immediate and mid-term turnover contagion risks. But true retention resilience requires more structural, forward-looking investments. Three pillars are particularly important.
Recalibrating the Psychological Contract
The psychological contract—the unwritten set of expectations between employer and employee—has shifted dramatically in recent years. The pandemic, the Great Resignation, and the rise of flexible work have collectively reset employee expectations around autonomy, purpose, and work-life integration (Sull et al., 2022). Organizations that cling to outdated psychological contracts—demanding loyalty without reciprocating flexibility, offering career advancement without meaningful development—will find their embeddedness interventions hollow.
Recalibrating the psychological contract means making explicit what was previously implicit. What does the organization genuinely offer in exchange for an employee's commitment? Competitive compensation is necessary but insufficient; employees increasingly seek purposeful work, growth opportunities, equitable treatment, and leaders they can trust. Research consistently shows that perceived organizational support and perceived supervisor support are powerful predictors of embeddedness and retention (Maertz et al., 2007). Organizations that invest in these relationship-based dimensions of the employment experience create a more resilient foundation against contagion.
Investing in Distributed Leadership and Managerial Quality
Gallup's 2023 State of the Global Workplace report found that 70% of team engagement variance is attributable to the manager (Gallup, 2023). If managers are the primary architects of team engagement, they are also—by extension—the primary architects of team embeddedness and the first line of defense against turnover contagion.
Yet the data suggest that many managers are themselves disengaging. Global manager engagement fell from 30% to 27% in 2024 (Gallup, 2025), meaning that the very people responsible for retaining others are increasingly at risk of leaving themselves. Investing in manager selection, development, and support is therefore not merely a nice-to-have; it is the organizational equivalent of maintaining herd immunity against contagion.
Organizations should prioritize:
Selecting managers for coaching ability, emotional intelligence, and relational skill—not merely technical proficiency.
Providing ongoing manager development focused on stay conversation techniques, team diagnostic skills, and the science of embeddedness.
Reducing manager span of control where possible, so that each leader has the bandwidth to maintain genuine relationships with every team member.
Creating Continuous Listening and Early-Warning Systems
The Felps et al. (2009) model implies that by the time an employee has reached the point of visible job searching, contagion may already be underway. Effective retention resilience therefore requires leading indicators—signals that embeddedness is eroding before search behavior becomes visible.
Continuous listening systems—short-cycle pulse surveys, sentiment analysis of communication channels (used ethically and transparently), manager check-in protocols, and team-level health dashboards—can provide early warning. The goal is not surveillance but signal detection: identifying teams where fit, links, or sacrifice are weakening so that targeted interventions can be deployed before the contagion threshold is crossed.
Some organizations are experimenting with people analytics models that integrate embeddedness indicators—tenure milestones, benefit utilization, internal mobility activity, commute distance changes—into predictive retention dashboards. While these tools raise important ethical considerations around employee privacy, their potential to interrupt contagion cascades before they become self-reinforcing is significant.
Conclusion
The decision to leave a job has never been as purely individual as traditional turnover models assumed. Felps et al. (2009) demonstrated empirically what many practitioners have long suspected: quitting is contagious. When coworkers are loosely tethered to their jobs—low in embeddedness—the social climate shifts in ways that normalize leaving, amplify job search visibility, and lower the psychological barriers to departure for everyone in the group. A one standard deviation increase in coworkers' job embeddedness was associated with a 45% to 67% reduction in individual turnover probability in the original studies, an effect size that rivals or exceeds the predictive power of individual-level attitudes alone.
For organizational leaders, this finding carries several actionable implications:
Think team, not just individual. Retention interventions that focus exclusively on at-risk individuals miss the group dynamics that produce contagion. Monitor and invest in team-level embeddedness as a strategic priority.
Make embeddedness systematic. Design onboarding, benefits, development, and community engagement programs that strengthen all three dimensions of embeddedness—fit, links, and sacrifice—across the entire workforce, not just top performers.
Equip managers as first responders. Managers are the earliest sensors and most potent interventionists for turnover contagion. Invest in their capability to diagnose team health, conduct stay conversations, and respond stabilizingly when departures do occur.
Reduce ambiguity and increase transparency. Social comparison thrives in ambiguity. The more employees understand their organization's direction, their own career prospects, and the genuine value of their total rewards, the less they need to rely on coworkers' behavior to answer the question, Should I leave?
Play the long game. Turnover contagion is a symptom of deeper organizational health. Address the root causes—psychological contract alignment, managerial quality, meaningful work, and inclusive culture—and the contagion risk diminishes naturally.
In an era of declining engagement and persistent labor market volatility, understanding the social architecture of retention is no longer optional. The organizations that thrive will be those that recognize quitting as a fundamentally social phenomenon—and design their retention strategies accordingly.
Research Infographic
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Jonathan H. Westover, PhD, Chief Research Officer (Nexus Institute for Work and AI); Co-Founder & Chief Workforce and Learning Officer (Future State University); Founder & CEO (Human Capital Innovations); Professor of Organizational Leadership & Change (UVU). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.
Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2026). Quitting Is Contagious: How Turnover Contagion Spreads Through Teams and What Leaders Can Do About It. Human Capital Leadership Review, 39(3). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.39.3.1
