Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior - Soltanieh ...

CONTROL VOLUNTARY TURNOVER BY UNDERSTANDING ITS CAUSES
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First, overall job satisfaction strongly correlates with affective organizational commitment
(r.65), and the intentions to search for another job (r .60) and intentions to leave
(r.46). More specifically, lower scores on job attitude measures are consistently
associated with more thoughts of leaving and job - search activities. Second, job satisfaction
(r.19), organizational commitment (r .23), thoughts of quitting (r .24), and
intentions to search (r .29) and intentions to leave (r .38) correlate moderately well
with actual turnover behavior. In other words, these variables are consistently associated with
employee withdrawal. Third, until people quit, less satisfied employees are absent slightly
more often (r ’ s between .10 and .l5), somewhat less helpful to co - workers (r ’ s between .22
and .26), and perform their jobs more poorly (r .25). Similarly, less affectively committed
employees also perform fewer citizenship behaviors (r .32), perform their jobs more poorly
(r.17), and have higher turnover intentions (r .51). Thus, employees with poor job
attitudes often exhibit multiple negative behaviors and can be difficult to manage.
What to monitor first: job attitudes. Every traditional theory on employee turnover includes job
dissatisfaction as either the primary starting point or as an early stage in the turnover process.
Moreover, the evidence indicates consistent and large correlations (cited above) between job
satisfaction and the intermediate variables (e.g. organizational commitment, intention to
search or to leave) before actual employee turnover occurs. In turn, the evidence reveals
consistent, moderate - sized, and predictive over time correlations between the intermediate variables
and actual quitting. When considered together, job satisfaction and organizational commitment
should be monitored as clear and compelling indicators of future employees ’ quitting.
Merely analyzing employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment in a static
manner is not enough. It is imperative to examine attitude trends over time. Employees
may experience significant decreases in attitudes over time and these changes may lead to
an increase in search and quit intentions and actual turnover. For example, employees
who appear to be satisfied with their jobs may decide to quit because some aspect of their
jobs changed over the past few weeks and made them be less satisfied than before. A static
approach to monitoring job attitudes would miss these nuances, and managers might
therefore inaccurately assume that these employees will most likely not leave. Eventual leavers
will likely experience a decline in job satisfaction and organizational commitment over time,
therefore rendering a dynamic monitoring of these attitudes essential to managers (Bentein,
Vandenberg, Vandenberghe, and Stinglhamber, 2005 ; Kammeyer- Mueller, Wanberg, Glomb,
and Ahlburg, 2005 ).
What to monitor second: global withdrawal cognitions. These traditional approaches most often
conceptualize factors such as thoughts of quitting, expected utility of job search, cost of quitting,
intention to search, evaluation of alternative jobs, comparisons between current and
alternative jobs, and intention to leave as separate entities. Correspondingly, organiz ational
behavior researchers have sought to measure and study these variables separately. An
enduring problem, however, is that these intermediate variables (between job satisfaction
and turnover) are difficult to separate accurately (e.g. using various statistical methods). As a
result, several turnover scholars have sought to simplify the meaning of these “ intermediate
steps. ” More specifically, these numerous factors have been reconceptualized and empirically
measured as a global and broader- based variable labeled “ withdrawal cognitions. ”