Fighting Turnover Intention: Meta-Analytic Insights on the Role of Talent Management and Employee Engagement

Nowadays, organizations are facing talent shortages with important costs. Talent management plays an important role in reducing turnover intention, and this relationship is often explained by the mediating role of employee engagement. This meta-analysis examines the relationships among these variables following PRISMA guidelines. Based on 29 studies, the results confirm talent management practices are significantly and negatively related to turnover intention, while employee engagement partially mediates this relationship. In addition to it, the study tested several moderators, none of them explaining the variance in effect sizes. This suggests that the observed relationships may be relatively stable across different demographic and contextual contexts, but also proposes some methodological challenges in the assessment of moderators. The findings highlight the importance of employee engagement as a key mechanism through which talent management practices influence turnover intention, and they call for further research into alternative mediators and more nuanced moderator analyses. This is the first meta-analysis to quantitatively synthesize these three variables, offering robust evidence for future theory and practice.