Employee Retention: A Comprehensive Review and Classification

The purpose of the current study is to review the academic literature in the field of employee retention, and to conduct a content analysis in order to classify and provide a comprehensive bibliography. Emerald Insight, Science Direct and Willey Online Library databases were used to review the available literature on employee retention. The database search showed 226 publications after mentioning employee retention as the primary research topic. The publication sample was further reduced to only include empirical research studies in qualitative and quantitative domain. The result was reduced to a sample of 79 research publications, which were classified in to mutually exclusive categories. The content analysis led to classification of literature on the basis of five categories, i.e. publication type, publication journal, publication research area, research region and publication year. The study identifies ten years’ history of research on employee retention starting from 2007 to present and hints towards future research prospects in research in terms of area of study, type of study. Current study provides a comprehensive bibliography that will be useful to both academicians and practitioners for studying existing research as well as for anticipating future research.