When the Penn State football scandal exploded in 2012, observers tended to frame events in terms of individuals behaving badly or irresponsibly. The perpetrator of child abuse was convicted and sent to prison; the head football coach was fired; the president of the University and several senior administrators were terminated; and the former head of the Board of Trustees was forced to resign. Certainly, these actions were understandable under the circumstances. Terrible crimes had been committed and covered up for over a decade. Nevertheless, an exclusively individual focus overlooks the roles of 9 groups whose collective behavior first allowed the criminal acts to occur and then put an end to them. The groups included the children's families and high school coaches, the Penn State football coaching staff, the Penn State senior administration, the Penn State Board of Trustees, the Second Mile charitable organization, the Centre County Pennsylvania criminal justice system, Penn State students, the Big 10 athletic conference, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. This article employs a group and intergroup perspective to analyze key events and to explain both the dysfunctional systemic behavior and the corrective actions.
The current research literature on voluntary employee turnover exhibits at least four shortcomings: low predictive validity, excessive exuberance with predictors, low rigor, and little relevance. Existing theories of voluntary employee turnover research are under specified, as none contains the full range of variables originally hypothesized by March and Simon as contributing to individual employees' decisions to quit their jobs. March and Simon (1958) contributed to the current state of affairs by making at least one assumption that subsequent results do not support. Subsequent efforts to expand theory and to detect and integrate new explanatory constructs have led to a much deeper understanding of the same small portion of turnover variance explained in employee decisions to quit. Deficiencies in current approaches and what a nondeficient model of voluntary employee turnover might look like are described. Directions for future voluntary turnover research are identified, as are past trends that need to be discontinued.
]]>