In the digital era, the application of new technology tools has reshaped the original work pattern, changed the way employees accomplish tasks and interpersonal communication, and provided sales employees with more autonomy. As a result, self-leadership has become increasingly important.

To investigate the impact of self-leadership on employee turnover in the digital era and its mechanism, this paper uses both qualitative and quantitative methods based on the sample of sales employees. First, using structured interviews, we discover that sales employees’ self-leadership behaviors are empowered by digital platform and manifested in active information seeking and internal social network building. Second, based on the self-control theory and the job embeddedness theory, we propose a theoretical model with the sales performance as a mediator. Using the behavior records of sales employees from a digital platform, we employ the survival model and Monte Carlo methods to analyze the data and find that sales performance plays a mediating role in the relationship between self-leadership and turnover. That is, the more self-leadership behaviors of sales employees on the digital platforms, the higher their sales performance; and the higher their performance, the less likely they turnover.

The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly, this paper provides an in-depth understanding of the specific behaviors of successful self-lead sales employees in the digital era, and contributes to the scarce results on self-leadership in the Chinese context. Secondly, this paper enriches the research on the impact of self-leadership on employee turnover in the digital era. It expands the understanding of employee turnover by explaining the causes of turnover at the individual level from the perspective of self-leadership. Finally, this paper pioneers the use of objective employee behavior records from a mobile work platform as the data source for the empirical study, which is a very useful exploration. The findings also provide practical insights for sales performance and turnover management from the self-leadership perspective in the digital era.