Parochialism in Western Management Theory: Understanding the Employee Turnover Phenomenon in the Omani Public Sector

This thesis is concerned with tracing the employee turnover phenomenon in the Omani public sector. One of the most important aims was to provide a causal relationship that would explain the failure of the Omani public sector to retain its employees. Hence, the research initially followed a positivist approach in the first phase of empirical analysis. Accordingly, the researcher used descriptive analysis of data gathered by the quantitative method, questionnaire. The results affirmed findings of the Western theories about the causes of the employee turnover. However, the results revealed as well that the problem does not revolve around the causes of employee turnover but around how Omanis construct the meaning of employee turnover. These results encouraged me to trace the applicability of Western theories in the Omani context. Accordingly, the research question was reshaped to trace the convergence, divergence or crossvergence between Omani and Western contexts and the analysis came to rely more on an interpretive approach. Thus, in the second phase of the empirical analysis I used the universal analytical framework of ‗Scott‘s 3 institutional pillars‘ to analyze the qualitative data, re-analyzing using template and matrix analyses. Scott‘s (1995) three institutional pillars comprise the regulative, normative, and cognitive pillars. Using these heuristic pillars to interpret my qualitative data suggested that the Omani and Western contexts are divergent in cognitive and regulative perspectives and suggestively convergent in normative perspective. Thus, I concluded the Omani and Western contexts are suggestively crossvergent which explains Omani behavior regarding employee turnover. Consequently, I concluded that Western theories are not completely applicable in the Omani context. Actually, this is what I called parochialism in management theory, where western theories are considered to be transferrable to other context, and has implications in management practice. Throughout this thesis I argue for existing of parochialism in western management theory, with focus on employee turnover theories, and their applicability into the Omani context.