The paths from insider to outsider: A review of employee exit transitions

Abstract

Employees' roles as organizational members often do not end immediately after they have made the decision to leave or it has been made for them. Instead, this decision serves as a turning point initiating an exit transition process. The purpose of this article is to consolidate prior scholarship in order to gain an understanding of the state of the science, as it pertains to exit transitions. Our literature review yielded almost 200 articles that have directly or indirectly studied the exit transition process. In organizing the insights from these studies, four categories of exit transition scholarship emerged—exit transitions in the context of voluntary turnover, involuntary turnover, temporary transitions, and top management exits. Moreover, our review indicated that exit transitions are shaped by three critical forces—the permanence of the transition, the magnitude of the identity change associated with the exit, and the organizational impact of the exit. We review research on each of the four categories and show how each type of transition is shaped by these forces. Finally, we turn our focus to the future of work and discuss how changes in the way that work is structured may alter the study of employee exit transitions in the future.