JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

The Goal of this thesis was to gain an understanding of why people decided to leave an ICT subcontracting and consultancy company. The study was conducted by analyzing roughly 300 employment ending interview transcripts written by an employee supervisor as notes for the company HR department. Later in the theory creation process also company annual reports were used to gain statistical information on employees, such as their background education and length of career. The research is qualitative in nature and the research method used was grounded theory. The chosen research approach is relativist and constructivist, meaning that the goal is to understand the subjective truth of the employee. The reason for this is to gain theory with explanatory power from the field with mixed and sometimes even contradictory results. The transitory theory built on top of empirical data during early phase of analysis directed research towards trust discussion in an organizational setting. At the same time, contemporary career discussion was examined to find further explanations to solve contradictions in the theory created by the data alone. In the end, it was found that faith in career fulfillment was the crucial component for the employees to leave the company. Scientifically faith creates, I would argue, a long yearned bridge between trust and career discussions. Faith works inside the career context where it determines if the employee will leave a company or not. If the employee does not have faith that his envisioned career can be fulfilled in the current organization he most likely makes the decision to leave. As a qualitative study this thesis cannot be generalized into the wider population, but can be generalized into the current career and trust discussions. It supplements both of them with an insight of why people decide to change work places.