Fostering excellence: Unraveling the nexus of organizational culture, employee optimization, and employee retention in higher education

This study aims to investigate the organization’s cultural aspects and their impact on employee retention. The main focus of the study is to embed the role of employee optimization between the cultural dimensions and employee retention constructs to study the level of influence. Higher education institutes were approached to collect data. The institutes were selected from private and public sectors using convenience sampling techniques. The questionnaire was constructed using various items on a 5-point Likert scale. These items were adopted from previous studies for the measurement of variables. Partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling technique was employed to statistically analyze and test the proposed hypothesis using SmartPLS. The findings elucidated that employee optimization has a positive significant impact on employee retention, whereas not all cultural dimensions of an institute contribute to employee optimization. The study implies that an institute’s HR should practice employee optimization to exercise healthy relations with employees, thus supporting a high level of employee retention. Future research and limitations are also explicated in the study.