Reciprocal Relationships Between Workplace Childcare Initiatives and Collective Turnover Rates of Men and Women

Abstract

Work-family practice research has largely been focused on individual outcomes, despite their theorized importance for organizational performance. Additionally, studies of the effectiveness of work-family practices are dominated by cross-sectional designs that are unable to rule out additional causal arguments for observed relationships. Finally, childcare initiatives that help employees better address family demands have received little research attention relative to other work-family practices, and these studies have produced mixed results. Grounded in context-emergent turnover theory, the present study assesses the relationship between establishment childcare initiatives and collective turnover rates of men and women in 24,888 observations of German establishments between 2002 and 2012. Findings indicate childcare initiatives are associated with lower female collective turnover rates in following years and that higher female collective turnover rates are also associated with a higher likelihood of adopting a childcare initiative in subsequent years. These results provide support for the argument that childcare initiatives can improve collective turnover rates of women and are not adopted only by already-high-performing organizations.