Under pressure to establish world-class universities, higher education institutions are competing for high-level talent and developing increasingly strict performance assessment mechanisms, which may cause academic staff turnover and potential talent loss. This study focuses on academic staff turnover in the context of reforms to the Chinese academic personnel system, featured by the adoption of a tenure track system. By adopting an ecological perspective, this study discerned a systematic influence of personnel system reforms on academic staff turnover across multiple levels of the academic ecosystem, including the social/institutional, organisational, interpersonal, and individual dimensions. The findings unravel possible discourse misalignment at different levels of the academic ecosystem, deepening understanding of the controversies around university personnel reforms. The study contributes to the global literature on academic staff turnover in the context of competition among world-class universities and offer lessons for other countries undergoing similar transformations in their higher education systems.