Turnover Intention: An HRM Issue in Textile Sector - journal ...

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INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN BUSINESS 

Turnover Intention: An HRM Issue in Textile Sector 

APRIL 2012 

VOL 3, NO 12 

Bashir Ahmad 

Department of Business Administration, Government College University Faisalabad, 

Pakistan 

Muhammad Shahid 

College of Commerce, Government College University Faisalabad, Pakistan 

Zill-E- Huma 


Sajjad Haider 


Abstract 

The growth and success of any organization is usually depends on it employees. So that, turnover in 

organization is significant challenge for any business and have far lasting effects. To comprehend the 

antecedents of employee turnover intention can help the top management in designing effective strategies to 

overcome this issue. The major purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between job satisfaction, job 

stress and turnover intention. Data was collected by using an adopted scale. Target population of the study was 

employees from selected textile firms. In this study, sample size was 250 employees. To test the hypothesis of 

the study, Pearson Correlation and Regression analysis were performed. Data analysis revealed that both 

hypotheses were substantiated. Managerial implications are that organizational leaders can overcome this issue 

by implementing the findings. 

Key Words: Job Satisfaction, Job Stress, Turnover Intention, Textile Sector 

1. Introduction and Background 

At present, economic recession at global level is pushing the developing economies like Pakistan also and 

slowdown prosperity significantly. The impact of these crises can be evidenced in public and private sector. 

Government is trying for to overcome these crises on urgent basis but the situation is still worsening. On the 

other hand, private sector is facing very critical issues due to energy crises in Pakistan. These crises have 

detrimental impact on textile sector largely in Pakistan, because textile industry is mainly dependent on state 

owned energy producing firms. Deficit in supply of energy compel these firms to retrench their business or 

transfer their operations in some other countries. In these circumstances, management is making some inflexible 

decision regarding their workforce, like downsizing or right sizing. Such types of decisions have adverse impact 

on both type of employees, employees which has been fired and existing employees. This study has mainly 

focused on existing employees. Existing employees are very uncertain about their future. They have intention to 

leave the organization in order to make their career safe and sound. So human resources department is also 

facing the challenge of retaining the employees with them in order to be successful. Turnover intention can be 

defined as how long an employee is willing to stay in an organization. If an organization desire to be successful 

for the long period of time, it must ensure to maintain satisfaction level of their employees (Berry, 1997). It has 

been observed that, most of the successful organization has more satisfied employees (Robbins and Judge, 

2007). As the satisfied workers are more productive and tend to show positive behaviors like organizational 

commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. Employees are the most value able asset of an 

organization. it is very important for management to understand employee’s needs in order to implement the 

business plan effectively. Individual’s turnover is considered a tenacious phenomenon that causes problems for 

business. By losing the skilled workforce lead to reduction on quality, productivity, innovation and 

competitiveness (Miller, 2010). Furthermore, turnover cause significant cost in tem of recruiting and training the 

new employees (Abbasi et al., 2008). 

COPY RIGHT © 2012 Institute of Interdisciplinary Business Research 125



APRIL 2012 

VOL 3, NO 12 

Turnover can be categorized as voluntary turnover and involuntary turnover. When employees decides to leave 

the organization their own choice, is called voluntary turnover, while, when an organization removes an 

employee is called involuntary turnover (Price & Mueller 1981). Historically, it has been investigated that 

involuntary turnover is generally good for the organizational interest (McShane & Williams, 1993); but 

voluntary turnover is considered very detrimental for organization. 

Generally, turnover is very detrimental and costly for the organization, both voluntary and involuntary. So, 

understanding the prospective antecedents of turnover is very important to diminish the problem. The major 

purpose of this study is to identify the critical factor causing the turnover intention among existing employees in 

textile sector of Pakistan in order to make suggestion to retain theses skillful workforce for organizational 

effectiveness. Furthermore, this study significantly helps the top management of textile industry to understand 

the needs of their employees in these circumstances and retained their valuable asset with them. 

2. Literature Review 

At workplace and working environment, as a result they do not feel good about their job is called as response 

approach. Finally, when working environment and affect at work, simultaneously caused stress in called 

stimulus-response approach. Historically, stress has been identifies as critical factor for organizational losses in 

term finance as well employee health. A study on nurses’ reveals that, stress causes illness, job dissatisfaction, 

turnover and absenteeism (Schwab, 1996). Job stress explains the stress exists in working environment. 

Employees feel pressure when they found miss match between requirement of job and their capacity to work 

effectively. Job stress differs from organization to organization, job to job and person to person. Generally, job 

stress at work has a contingent impact on employees and cause intention to quit the organization. 

Job satisfaction can be defined as pleasant feelings that reveal from an affective response to the work and 

working situation (Dipboye et al., 1994). On the hand, various scholars defined job satisfaction as an attitude, 

some consider it as behavior. Weiss (2002) argue that job satisfaction can be consider as an attitude, furthermore 

he suggest that to clearly conceptualize this phenomenon, researchers should investigate it more intensively. 

According to these definitions, first our attitude emerges about, than we feel and accordingly respond. 

There are variety of factor that may influence the job satisfaction of employees, like pay, promotion, working 

conditions, relationship with peer and supervisors and job design. if employees found all these factors 

contradictory to their perceptions, they tend to be more to leave the organization. Turnover refers to leave the 

organization permanently. Job satisfaction and turnover intention has native correlation. Job satisfaction, 

strongly influence the turnover of employees. At organizational level, this relationship has been widely 

explored. According to Hackman & Oldham (1975) has increased relationship with greater productivity, less 

absenteeism, decreased employees’ turnover. Wong (1989) founds the relationship between job satisfaction and 

intention quit the jobs among teachers. Findings of the study were that lower the job satisfaction, lower the job 

commitment and performance. Furthermore teachers have more intention to leave this job if they found some 

attractive benefits from someone else. On the other hand, Griffeth, et al., (2000) found a surprising negative 

relationship between job satisfaction and employee turnover. Additionally, Glance, et al., (1997) explored that 

turnover and productivity is positively correlated. Amah (2009) point out that job satisfaction has direct and 

negative association with turnover intention. Jackofsky and Peter (1983) argued that association between job 

satisfaction and turnover intention high, if a dissatisfy employee has belief that there are other job opportunities 

available in the market. Job satisfaction strongly affects the decisions related to continue the existing job or 

terminate it. It is observed that dissatisfied employees have more probability to quit the organization 

(Schermerhorn, et al., 2000). 

Job stress has identified significant area for research in the organizations now days (Gellis & Kim, 2004). 

According to Lazarus and Folkman (1984) stress is a vibrant association between employee and working 

environment. Job stress has been investigated in three forms by the researchers, some consider it as a stimulus, 

and several take it as a response, while certain scholar investigated it as stimulus-response relationship (Jex, et 

al., 1992). When stress is caused by working environment and it harms employee performance, is called as 

stimulus. According to this approach, working environment is a real factor that causes stress. 

H 1 : There is a negative significant relationship between Job Satisfaction and Turnover Intention. 

H 2 : There is negative significant relationship between Job Stress and Turnover Intention. 




APRIL 2012 

VOL 3, NO 12 

3. Theoretical Framework 

Job 

Satisfaction 

Turnover 

Intention 

Job Stress 

4. Research Methodology 

In this study, data was collected by using a self-administered survey to all available employees in selected 

textile organizations. The questionnaire was consisting on two major portions. Frist part consisted on 

demographic information about the employees. All the respondents were contacted by personally visiting the 

organization during working hours. Initially, 300 questionnaires were distributed and received bank 250 

completed questionnaires with the response rate of 83% which were considered for further data analysis. Nonprobability 

i.e. convenient sampling method was applied in this study as the research faced the issues of limited 

resources in term of finance and time. As for the questionnaire, it was an adopted questionnaire. Job stress and 

Intention to quit was measured by the scale designed by Firth et al., 2004, while job satisfaction was measured 

by the scale designed by LeRouge et al., 2006. Various statistical methods were applied to analyze the data. For 

this purpose, SPSS 19.0 was used. 

4.1. Data Analysis 

In this study, total respondents were 250, out of them, about 61% were male and rest of the participants was 

female. Age distribution in this study revealed that major portion of respond were from the age group of 31 to 

40 (58.4%) and only 2% were belong to age group of 51 and above which were the lowest. Most of the 

respondents were having graduate and post graduate degrees. Results suggested that 63% graduates, 25% were 

post graduate and rest were having other related degrees. To measure internal consistency of scale, Cronbach’s 

Alpha was implied. It has been proved that if a scale has alpha coefficient closer to 1.00, it has greater reliability 

(Sekaran, 2003), and the scale having reliability lower than 0.60 is not considered good. Generally, scale having 

the value in range of over 70 is considered good and acceptable. In present study, all variables have good 

reliabilities which are greater than 0.70. The alpha coefficient if job satisfaction is 0.916, job stress has the value 

of alpha 0.82 and turnover intention 0.78. To assess the linear relationship among variables of the study, Pearson 

Correlation analysis was performed. According to Muchinsky (1993), the values of correlation are started from - 

1.00 to +1.00. If the relationship has value closer to -1.00 that the relationship is weak and vise-versa. It is 

evidenced from correlational analysis of current study that job satisfaction and job stress are negatively 

correlated with turnover intention. To test the hypothesis, regression analysis was used. Model summary is 

showing the values of R2=0.341 and Adjusted R2=0.311 which represents the variation in depend variable due 

to independent variables. The result of ANOVA indicate that job satisfaction and job stress has significant and 

negative relationship with turnover intention with the values of F=3.52 and P= 0.005. Thus, model of this 

research is statistically significant. There are two significant variables in the coefficient analysis. Results shown 

that the beta values for job satisfaction and job stress are -0.263 and -0.265 respectively and P-value is less than 

significant level. So the both hypothesis of the study are supported. 




5. Discussion, Conclusion and Future Recommendations 

APRIL 2012 

VOL 3, NO 12 

Current study tests the relationship between job satisfaction, job stress and turnover intention among 

employees from selected textile firms. To collect data, questionnaire was distributed by personally visiting after 

taking the permission from Human Resource Manager of the concerned firm. The format of questionnaire was 

as: Section first was consisting on Personal Characteristics of respondents while second section contained items 

related to job satisfaction, job stress and turnover intention. Moreover, the data was analyzed by using the latest 

version of SPSS. 

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship among job satisfaction, job stress and 

turnover intention. Hypothesis of the study were, “There is a negative significant relationship between Job 

Satisfaction and Turnover Intention” and “There is negative significant relationship between Job Stress and 

Turnover Intention”. The results suggested that job satisfaction is significantly and negatively correlated with 

turnover intention. The results are consistent with the findings of Hulin (1966). Hulin test the job satisfaction 

among clerical level employee with relation to turnover intention and negative impact. In 2000, Seta et al. also 

confirm the same findings. So these studies support the current findings also. As for the relationship among job 

stress and turnover intention, job stress has significant negative relationship to turnover intention. It has been 

evidenced that, employees experienced more job stress has more intention to quit. According to Lazarus and 

Folkman (1984) stress is a vibrant association between employee and working environment. Job stress has been 

investigated in three forms by the researchers, some consider it as a stimulus, and several take it as a response, 

while certain scholar investigated it as stimulus-response relationship (Jex, et al., 1992). When stress is caused 

by working environment and it harms employee performance, is called as stimulus. So the findings of the study 

are consistent with the expectation. The findings of this study are very useful for the textile sector to cope up the 

critical issue of the turnover intention. These findings can help the Human Resource Managers to reduce 

organizational cost by reducing the turnover rate. 

This study is not without limitations, resources in term of finance and time was the major constraint in 

this study. For this reason, the data was collected only from limited cities. Furthermore, sampling technique was 

convenient sampling, it was also due to time factor. As, this technique is considered useful when time is limited. 

In the end, data was just collected for one time. In future studies, it is suggested that research may expand this 

work by fulfilling the limitations of this study and also test the impact of emotional labor and organizational 

pride on turnover intention. 




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APRIL 2012 

VOL 3, NO 12 

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