Factors influencing employee intention to quit and stay: a scoping review and insights for future research

Different organisations frequently face employee retention challenges, reflected in employees’ intention to quit or stay. Understanding the drivers of the decisions is critical for developing effective employee retention strategies. This scoping review aims to identify gaps in the literature, investigate the factors influencing intention to quit or stay in an organisation, and offer suggestions for future inquiry. Guided by a population–concept–context approach and reported in line with PRISMA-ScR, we searched Web of Science, PubMed, EBSCOhost, and Nature for English-language, peer-reviewed empirical studies published between 2014 and 2024. To broaden coverage, we added IEEE Xplore and conducted a supplementary Google Scholar search (screening the first 200 results) up to February 2026. Search terms combined variations of “intention to quit”, “intention to stay”, “intention to leave”, “turnover intention”, “retention”, “employee”, and “workplace”. Non-empirical publications were excluded, and full texts that could not be retrieved were excluded at the eligibility stage. Eighteen studies met the inclusion criteria. Findings clustered into three domains: organisational, interpersonal, and individual factors. Organisational influences included workplace policies/practices, working conditions, job design, and HR/retention practices. Interpersonal factors highlighted supportive supervisor–employee and co-worker relationships, as well as harmful workplace experiences (e.g. violence/bullying) linked to higher intention to quit. Individual factors included attitudes and psychological states such as job satisfaction, exhaustion, motivation, and self-efficacy. Notable gaps persist concerning generational differences, uneven sector coverage, limited cross-cultural generalisability, and a predominance of cross-sectional designs. Future research should expand under-represented sectors and test integrated multi-level models to strengthen the evidence base for retention strategies.