Date of Award
2004
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Department
Fischer Graduate School of Education and Human Services
Advisor
Patrick Chambers
Committee Member
Gloria Wolfson
Committee Member
Maryellen Maher
Keywords
attrition, challenging tasks, decision-making, employee retention, empowerment, goals, human resource management, intrinsic motivation, labor force development, labor turnover, leadership, leadership qualities, management workshops, organizational development, participative decisions, positive use of mistakes, reflection, service quality, Seattle, surveys, technical companies, technical support, technology companies, vision, Web site, workplace retention
Abstract
Technical support departments within technology companies have traditionally seen high attrition rates that undermine the quality of service that they are able to provide. In order to offset the high rates of attrition, technical support managers need to find alternative leadership strategies designed to encourage technical support employees to remain their jobs. This report describes both a study and a workshop that were designed to address this employee retention problem.
Surveys were sent out to the support managers of 141 technical companies around the Seattle area. The return rate was 30% yielding 32 valid responses. The survey asked for employee attrition rates and also asked the respondents to rate the presence or absence of 17 specific leadership qualities in their own departments. Correlations were determined between the attrition numbers the leadership qualities to determine if any showed a positive relationship to higher levels of employee retention.
From this study, 7 leadership qualities were identified has having positive correlations with higher employee retention. These were vision, participative decisions, setting departmental goals, reflection, positive use of mistakes, challenging tasks, and intrinsic motivation.
These 7 leadership qualities were combined with relevant literature to construct a manager’s workshop on employee retention. The purpose of this workshop was to provide support team managers with specific actions that they could take to address the problems of employee retention. This workshop was conducted for the 1st time with the Service and Support Consortium, a Seattle-based collection of technical support managers. The workshop content was also provided on a Web site.