Determinants of turnover intentions among Chinese off farm migrants

Abstract

This study examines the determinants of turnover intentions of off farm migrant workers, using data collected from China's Jiangsu Province. Turnover intention is posited to be a function of demographic/human capital characteristics, job characteristics and job satisfaction. We find that higher levels of education have a positive effect on reported turnover intentions, while higher income and job satisfaction have a negative effect on turnover intentions. As turnover intentions represent a good proxy for actual turnover, the results can be viewed as providing reliable predictors of job mobility among off farm migrant workers at a time when there is a growing shortage of such workers in China's coastal provinces.

Labor Market Dynamics and Structural Change: Evidence from China

“…The negative effect of age on the job change rate is also confirmed by Kidd (1991, 1994), Campbell (1997, and Sousa- Poza and Henneberger (2004), and is in line with the theory that the difficulty to amortize job change costs increases with age (Shapiro and Sandell, 1985). In addition, some previous empirical studies suggest a positive role of education in the probability of changing jobs, because educated people may have more and better labor market alternatives (Royalty, 1998;Smyth et al, 2009). Unfortunately, most of these papers only include a few personal characteristics in their analyses and they seldom examine how the effect of a particular factor varies for labor movements between different sectors.…”

“…However, because of demand-side or supply-side heterogeneities, the probability of switching among sectors differs across people. This paper reveals these differences through restoring a long-period, individual-level panel dataset from China 's Urban Household Survey for 1986-2009. We find that both for people who started working for the first time and those who switched jobs, the sector choice depends on personal characteristics.…”

Expressed Turnover Intention: Alternate Method for Knowing Turnover Intention and Eradicating Common Method Bias

“…Over the years, researchers and practitioners have identified the number of factors associated with the turnover intentions. The main strand of the literatures primarily concentrated on limited antecedents to turnover intention and actual turnover [17] such as job dissatisfaction [10,18], lower commitment [10,19], general adjustment [18], stress or job tension [10], justice [20]. The findings from these studies suggest that higher organizational commitment, job satisfaction and fairness at work are negatively related with turnover intention.…”

Impact of the 2007–09 global economic crisis on human resource management among Chinese export-oriented enterprises

“…In August 2009, when the first draft of this contribution was written, overseas demand for Chinese exports had started to pick up. A large number of manufacturers in the coastal regions found it extremely hard to recruit workers, especially skilled and experienced workers (Smyth et al 2009). Since the workforce is mostly comprised of offfarm migrants, the shortage of workers in Chinese coastal regions is called 'ming gong huang (off-farm migrant worker shortage)' (Shen 2007).…”