News Release (WASHINGTON, D.C.) -- According to a new study by Leadership IQ, 47% of high performers are actively looking for other jobs (they’re posting and submitting resumes, and even going on interviews).

While it’s terrible that almost half of high performers are thinking about quitting, what’s perhaps even worse is that low performers want to stay. Only 18% of low performing employees are actively seeking other jobs, and 25% of middle performers are actively looking around.

Leadership IQ surveyed 16,237 employees on a range of workforce and retention issues, and then divided them into high, middle and low performer categories based on their annual performance appraisal scores. There were 3,896 employees identified as high performers, 8,607 identified as middle performers, and 3,734 low performers.

"High performers keep companies in business," says Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, "so every company is at risk if these people leave. If you lose some low performers, you might actually be better off. But when your best people quit, revenue drops, quality suffers, and snafus increase. Even large companies can take a big hit with the departure of just a few key employees."

Murphy continues "The worst part of this is that we typically cause our high performers to quit by how we treat them. Frankly, we treat our high performers worse than any other employee. When a manager has a tough project upon which the whole company depends, to whom do they turn? Who gets the late hours and the stress? It’s not the low performers, because managers want the project done right. Instead managers turn to their handful of high performers. Over and over we ask our high performers to go above and beyond, making their jobs tough and burning them out at a terrible pace. Meanwhile, low performers often get easier jobs because their bosses dread dealing with them and may avoid them altogether."