Employee Voluntary Turnover

The study of employee voluntary turnover is an important organizational issue that has received great attention for many decades. According to Mobley (1982), when an employee decides to leave, many effects can occur to the organization and to employees. Researchers studying turnover have identified a vast number of variables scattered throughout the turnover and work attitude literature (Griffeth, Hom & Gaertner, 2000; Maertz, & Griffeth, 2004). According to Steel (2002), most of the qualitatively relevant core models focused on job attitudes as the main reason for leaving, and were based on March and Simon’s model (1958) that dissatisfaction ultimately influences employee turnover (Mobley, 1977). However, although job satisfaction (JS) is a key predictor of employee turnover (Mossholder, Settoon, & Henagan, 2005), Griffeth and colleagues (2000) sustained that the strength of the relationship between satisfaction and turnover was weak. Previously, Judge (1993) argued that the relationship between satisfaction and turnover could be mediated by one or more variables. Furthermore, Mathieu and Zajac (1990) sustained that the dominant view on voluntary turnover assumed that satisfaction influences commitment and that organizational commitment mediates the effect of satisfaction on turnover intention. In particular, Mathieu and Zajac (1990) argued that “the most common use of organizational commitment in causal models mediated the influences of personal characteristics and work experiences on employee turnover processes” (p. 188). According to Wagner’s meta-analysis (2007), all three components of commitment influenced turnover and were negatively correlated with both turnover intention and voluntary turnover. However, although the corr...

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...ond other core aspects of traditional models (Crossley, Bennett, Jex, & Burnfield, 2007). According to Mossholder and colleagues (2005), the absence or reduction of social attachments may create a contextual force that drives employees to choose to quit the organization.

The purpose of this study is to develop and test a conceptual model of turnover processes through which both work and non-work variables influence turnover intention, taking into account the role of two off-the job variables: WFC and CE. The theoretical grounding for the turnover process is derived from the empirical model of Price & Mueller (1981a). The rationale for the effects of work-family conflict and community embeddedness on turnover process is provided by Role Conflict Theory (Kahn et al., 1964) and JE theory , respectively (Mitchell, et al., 2001). Figure 1 shows the hypothesized model.