Originally found at Business Insider

When one employee leaves, the departure can have a ripple effect on others on the same team; suddenly those remaining workers, too, are more likely to head for the exit. It's a phenomenon that might help explain the staying power of the Great Resignation, a period in which workers have been quitting — and changing jobs — at record levels.

Now new research suggests layoffs are correlated with the same behavior. Visier, a human-resources analytics company, found that when employees were laid off or terminated, the likelihood that their direct colleagues would quit was 7.7% higher than if those employees had remained. Visier published a study about turnover contagion following resignations and later detailed its finding related to layoffs in a LinkedIn post

Layoffs are piling up in corners of corporate America — Twitter is said to have let go of 200 employees over the weekend in addition to the 7,500 that the social media giant axed last year; meanwhile, other tech giants including Google and Microsoft have also shed workers this year, as have Goldman Sachs and Disney. The findings have implications for firms that have recently let go of large numbers of employees or are considering it: The layoffs might push other workers out the door.

Continue reading the original article at Business Insider.

Read the original research in Academy of Management Journal.

Learn more about the AOM Scholars and explore their work:

• David R. Hekman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Elena Obukhova, McGill University