Tied In or tied up? The contrasting effects of social ties on employee turnover

A key theoretical tension in organizational network research lies in understanding how interpersonal connections shape employee turnover. While extensive workplace networks can reduce turnover by granting access to valuable information and resources, they can also increase it by exposing employees to information overload, leading to cognitive strain and disengagement. Drawing on process theory, we bridge these two previously disconnected mechanisms—information access and information overload—to uncover how they jointly influence turnover. We propose that an intermediate number of instrumental workplace connections maximizes retention, as it balances the benefits of information access with the burdens of overload. Specifically, we theorize that information access exhibits diminishing marginal returns in mitigating turnover as additional connections provide less value, while information overload accelerates as employees struggle to process a growing volume of inputs, resulting in a U-shaped relationship between the size of an employee’s network and turnover. We test these arguments across four studies: two pre-registered experiments and two field studies of employees in large organizations. Our findings challenge conventional wisdom that larger networks are universally beneficial, providing insights into how the structure of informal networks drives turnover dynamics.