Every single survey done on employee satisfaction shows salary coming much further down the scale than other factors, like engaging work, good management, leadership, a feeling of contribution, training and growth, etc.
The best, easiest, most profitable way of reducing turnover is to improve their management and leadership. Once you've reduced turnover the benefits of good training far exceed the costs and you get less turnover and more productive staff as a result. Then you can give them a raise so they appreciate the benefits of being more productive.
I think that depends on if the salary is fair. If it's not fair (below market) then it becomes the overwhelming factor. Above fair, it quickly has diminishing returns and other factors are stronger. Part of good management is recognizing this.
They are far, far from basic requirements for a job. They may be for engineers and highly skilled professionals, but for the majority of workers the only basic requirements are reasonable workplace safety and humane hours - and even those are often in question.
You don't get such numbers by asking people 'what would you prefer' - that would give wrong answers even w/o lying, since many of those things are such where sociologists know that the believed preference (what you think you'd choose) differs from the true preference (what you do choose in reality).
But you get useful results if you (a) ask people how happy they are (even if they exaggerate and understate, the ranking is generally accurate), and (b) ask people if they're getting X in the company, and then measure the correlations (and do a bunch of tricky adjustments for factors that are interrelated).
I.e., you don't ask "is a fair boss important for you? are office conditions important for you?" - but, if for example, on average the people who think they have a fair boss are feeling happier than those who think they have an unfair boss; but those who think that the office conditions really suck are just as [un]happy that those who feel that the office is okay - now, that's useful signal.
I think they might respond assuming that "higher salary" means +15%, which is what you can realistically expect in low-paid jobs, and which, for most people, is not worth dealing with an asshole boss, bad work environment etc.
In tech, on the other hand, it can be $70k for a fullfilling job vs $200k for a boring grind in say finance...
