Hybrid work or working fully from home in the high-tech sector does it work? The effect of working from home, job embeddedness, supervisor listening and motivation on engineers turnover behaviour in the high-tech sector. What can be learn for the pos

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic broke out in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. In February 2020, countries responded to the pandemic by issuing guidelines to maintain social distancing, including enforcing lockdowns. Organisations were required to have their employees work from home (WFH), which had both positive and negative outcomes. During this pandemic, employees were embedded/stuck at home in the lockdown, and as people were forced to WFH remotely, a key question emerged: How does working from home - along with job embeddedness, supervisor’ listening perception, turnover intention and motivation-affect together simultaneously on turnover behaviour in such a context. This paper main aim is to examine that. Design/methodology/approach Five hypotheses were formulated for this research. Data were drawn from an online survey of 126 professional IT employees of a global high-tech firm in the first COVID-19 lockdown in Israel. Logistic regression analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses (via PROCESS) along with a sensitivity power analysis. Discriminant and convergent validity through a series of confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to evaluate the model. Findings The main findings indicate that embeddedness (“stuckness”) decreases turnover intention, and that turnover intention mediates the job embeddedness–decision to leave relationships. Intent to leave mediated the embeddedness–actual turnover relationship only for individuals with a low level of job motivation. Finally, a significant moderated–mediating effect of embeddedness on actual turnover through turnover intention for individuals who rated their supervisors’ listening as high but had low motivation was found. These findings offer important insights for managers of high-tech firms aiming to improve employee retention and reduce turnover behaviour. Finally, it was found that WFH strategy that was used during the COVID-19 pandemic (that might create quiet quitting) and is still used in the labour market and the high-tech sector is not significantly related to IT employees’ turnover intention and hence will not prevent intent to leave and probably turnover behaviour in the IT sector. The findings are discussed considering the literature. Originality/value This paper emphasises the findings of full remote work/WHF in the high-tech sector among engineers in lockdown conditions on turnover behaviour. No research examined it under full closure conditions of the COVID-19 when employees were forced to WFH only and work only remotely while they did not work hybrid and cannot do that because of the lockdown. Bloom et al. (2024, p. 1) found that “hybrid work improved reduced quit rates by one-third”. However, in contrast to that research, this study checked the impact of hybrid work and not full WFH and also with a different study population. Thus, it seems that to fully WFH where employees were forced to work entirely remotely and cannot work hybrid, there is a different impact on IT employees’ turnover. Additionally, WFH setup did not moderate or mediate the embeddedness–turnover intention/resigning relationship. Thus, indirectly encouraging embeddedness can assist in retaining IT employees and preventing turnover behaviour. Employees’ motivation level moderates the relationship between embeddedness and intent to leave at varying levels. Finally, listening moderates motivation’s significant moderated mediation effect on the relationship between embeddedness and intent to leave. These results extend the turnover literature.