Organizational sociotechnical diagnosis of managerial retention in an IT organization SAP-LAP framework Koustab Ghosh and Sangeeta Sahney Vinod Gupta School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India Abstract Purpose – Turnover of managerial employees at junior and middle levels has been widely recognized as a critical organizational concern. The problem happens to be more intensified for organizations belonging to the service sector as the services provided to client/customer groups get directly affected. A number of studies have shown that compensation factor alone does not explain the retention of managerial employees in the organization. This paper aims to focus on designing and balancing the organizational social and technical subsystems elements in order to moderate the turnover of junior and middle level managers in the company. Design/methodology/approach – A number of selective junior and middle level managers were interviewed in-depth and content analysis was made for categorization of level-wise qualitative responses. The situation actor process-learning action performance (SAP-LAP) framework has been adopted as the diagnostic instrument of organizational analysis. Findings – The findings from the paper shows that the organizational sociotechnical factors have an impact on managerial retention and the suggestive actions from the paper attempt to find solutions to the problem of managerial turnover faced by the company. Originality/value – The SAP-LAP framework as an instrument to the diagnosis of organizational sociotechnical system provides useful inputs to the management for future course of actions. Maintaining the balance between the social and technical subsystem factors is a critical prerequisite to managerial retention. Keywords Sociotechnical change, Retention, Employee turnover, Organizational analysis, Junior managers, Middle managers Paper type Case study 1. Theoretical framework Sociotechnical system is an established methodology that provides a structured approach to redesign of job-related processes (Pasmore and Sherwood, 1978; Taylor and Felten, 1993; Fox, 1995; Eijnatten, 1998). It holds that jobs in organization can be conceived in terms of social and technical subsystems. Broadly, the social subsystem includes the profile and expectations of organizational members, patterns of supervisory-subordinate relationships, interpersonal relationship of employees and the nature and interaction of subgroups within the population. The technical subsystem of an organization consists of the tools, work techniques and procedures, skills, knowledge, and devices used by members of the social subsystem to accomplish the tasks of the organization (Trist and Bamforth, 1951; Thompson and Bates, 1957; Woodward, 1958; Emery, 1959; Emery and Trist, 1965). At the micro level, the social The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1934-8835.htm Managerial retention in an IT organization 151 International Journal of Organizational Analysis Vol. 18 No. 1, 2010 pp. 151-166 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1934-8835 DOI 10.1108/19348831011033258