Voluntary turnover rates, job demands, and patient satisfaction. Our study also extends CET theory
by examining changes to average job demands—a unit-level description of the required work for an average employee. Focusing on job demands highlights the expectations faced by remaining unit employees after departures occur, and the fact that replacement hiring is often subject to delay. Measures of job demands quantify the ratio
of required output to human resources available in a unit. Job demands at the unit level are similar to
productivity (e.g., Shaw et al., 2005b) and capacity (Hausknecht & Holwerda, 2013). However, job demands represent the amount of work and time required of the average employee, whereas productivity
captures output per person and capacity captures the potential utilization of the resource. By integrating this theoretically relevant but underresearched mediator into our model, we follow the calls of strategic human resource management researchers to better embed theoretical arguments in causal chains (Becker & Gerhart, 1996), while adding a missing causal link to CET theory.