Literature Review on Attrition and Retention of Knowledge Workers

The survival and success of every business increasingly depends on the performance of its knowledge workforce. As such knowledge worker retention is a critical challenge for today's organizations as they face increasing global competition. Failure to retain the key knowledge workers is an indication of losing competitive advantage in the globalised knowledge-based economy. The cost of labour turnover of these key resources is high in both financial and non-financial terms. There is thus a need to understand what the factors are that underpin the retention cognitions of knowledge workers. What are the most important variables and underlying factors affecting the turnover and retention cognitions of knowledge workers? The present study is a small attempt to find out the key factors to reduce the level of turnover and explore the scope for further research to formulate various strategies to retain the key knowledgeable employees through a substantive review of the available literature in this field.