thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University

General Introduction
there is a unified belief that we will be facing a shortage of qualified workers. This is thought
to produce the often cited “war for talent” (Michaels, Handfield-Jones, & Axelrod, 2001).
Accordingly, it cannot be expected that successors will have the same qualifications as their
predecessors and will be able to easily fill their shoes. Consequently, keeping the knowledge
of leaving employees within the company is even more important and in the present situation.
Third, and most important, the nature of knowledge in organizations itself has changed
(DeLong, 2004; Leibold & Voelpel, 2006). Partly due to the vast development of information
and communication technologies, knowledge has become much more specialized and
complex. Especially in domains like science, engineering, and other technical fields, the
introduction of ever more potent computers has led knowledge to be much more diversified,
complex and extensive. At the same time, the work in knowledge-intensive domains has
become much more interdisciplinary. For example, a researcher in psychology nowadays does
not only have to deal with much more sophisticated statistical procedures (a rise in
complexity), but also has to know more about related disciplines such as biology, sociology,
or neurology (a rise in interdisciplinarity). Consequently, employees working under such
conditions as just described develop an expertise that is much more difficult to replace than
was an employee’s knowledge a generation ago (DeLong, 2004). Thus, the risk for
organizations to lose knowledge is much more pronounced today than it was before.
Being faced with this threat of losing invaluable resources, organizations are well advised
to take action. To this end, several strategies have been proposed in the literature. DeLong
(2004) argues that the prevention of knowledge loss has to be addressed throughout an
employee’s career; starting with the attraction and recruitment of young employees to whom
knowledge from leaving employees can be transferred to, leading over to the retention of midcareer
employees who could leave with huge amounts of critical knowledge, and culminating
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