Evolutions and paths: Voluntary employee turnover theories in search of new empirical tests

The retention of human capital remains a vital point of interest for both organizations and scholars today, as it has for over a century. While many models of voluntary turnover exist, we identify two turnover theories, Steel's (2002) Evolutionary Job Search Model of Turnover and Lee and Mitchell's Unfolding Model of Turnover, that we believe offer significant opportunities for future research. In this editorial, we review these two theories, highlighting the impact of each and offering several recommendations for future replication. Specifically, after reviewing 183 articles that cited Steel, we found that only a few of these directly tested the core propositions of the model, likely due to the complexity of the challenges of sufficiently capturing the dynamic components, and none have fully tested the model. Additionally, despite being published only six years prior, we identified 748 articles that cited Lee and Mitchell, yet we found that only 127 empirically examined the model, with most focused on specific components of the model, and only 15 attempted to test the entire model. We provide several methodological and theoretical suggestions for progressing these two models towards a better understanding of voluntary turnover.