Staying or Leaving? How Job Satisfaction, Embeddedness and Antecedents Predict Turnover Intentions of Software Professionals
\textbf{Context:} Voluntary turnover is common in the software industry, increasing recruitment and onboarding costs, and the risk of losing organizational and tacit knowledge. \textbf{Objective:} This study investigates how job satisfaction, work-life balance, job embeddedness, and their antecedents, including job quality, personality traits, attitudes toward technical and sociotechnical infrastructure and perceptions of organizational justice, relate to software professionals turnover intentions. \textbf{Method:} We conducted a geographically diverse cross-sectional survey of software professionals (N=224) and analyzed the data using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Our model includes both reflective and formative constructs and tests 15 hypotheses grounded in occupational psychology and software engineering literature. Additionally, indirect effects were tested exploratively. \textbf{Results:} Job satisfaction and embeddedness were significantly negatively associated with turnover intentions of software professionals, while work-life balance showed no direct effect. The strongest antecedents for job satisfaction were work-life balance and job quality, while organizational justice was the strongest predictor of job embeddedness. Exploratory analysis suggests that job satisfaction and job embeddedness mediate the effect of job quality, organizational justice and work-life balance on turnover intentions. \textbf{Discussion:} The resulting PLS-SEM model has considerably higher explanatory power of key outcome variables than previous work done in the software development context, highlighting the importance of both psychological (e.g., job satisfaction, job embeddedness) and organizational (e.g., justice, job quality) factors in understanding turnover intentions of software professionals. Our results imply that improving job satisfaction and job embeddedness are the key to retaining software professionals. In turn, enhancing job quality, supporting work-life balance and having a high organizational justice can improve job satisfaction and embeddedness, indirectly reducing turnover intentions. Our results broadly suggest that retention strategies are best focused on fairness, meaningful work, and work-life balance.
