How 'organizational factors' outclass 'personal factors' in retaining Female Employees in Indian IT SMEs

Abstract

The article examines organizational and personal factors in relation to the retention of the female workers in the IT SMEs. The organizations operating in the business cities of India were targeted using convenience sampling technique. In addition to that, purposive sampling was used for reaching only female participants. Total 250 females out of 380 completed survey from 30 different software SMEs. The findings of this cross-sectional study reflects that the effectiveness of organizational factors such as work-life balance practices and policies, supervisory support, and technological assistance enable female workers to exhibit higher performance under stress. Interestingly, the myth of personal factor such as personality, well-being, and emotional intelligence previously found to be effective, in actual does not improve retention rate of female workers at operational level. In addition to that, detailed analysis revealed that supervisory support is most closely interlinked with retention, followed by policies and procedures of Work Life Balance, and lastly technological assistance. Moreover, societal norms have significant role to certain extent in the creating retention related perception of female workers.