Should I Stay or Should I Go? Explaining Turnover Intentions with Organizational Identification and Job Satisfaction^*

Abstract

The social identity approach is a powerful theoretical framework for the understanding of individuals' behaviour. The main argument is that individuals think and act on behalf of the group they belong to because this group membership adds to their social identity, which partly determines one's self-esteem. In the organizational world, social identity and self-categorization theories state that a strong organizational identification is associated with low turnover intentions. Because identification is the more general perception of shared fate between employee and organization, we propose that the relationship between identification and turnover will be mediated by job satisfaction as the more specific evaluation of one's task and working conditions. In four samples we found organizational identification feeding into job satisfaction, which in turn predicts turnover intentions.

Perceived organizational support and organizational identification: joint moderating effects of employee exchange ideology and employee investment

“…OID plays a central role in employee-organization relationship, which has been found to lead to a range of positive employee and organizational outcomes (Ashforth, Harrison and Corley, 2008), such as low turnover intention (e.g., Smith et al, 2010;Van Dick et al, 2004), organizational citizenship behaviour (e.g., Van Dick, Grojean, Christ and Wieseke, 2006), employee satisfaction, and well-being (Knight and Haslam, 2010), financial benefits to the organization (Millward and Postmes, 2010), employee performance (e.g., Walumbwa et al, 2011), and employee creativity (Wang and Rode, 2010). Therefore, it is theoretically and practically important to better understand the antecedents of OID (Ashforth et al, 2008;Davenport and Daellenbach, 2011).…”

The Relationship between Occupational Stress, Burnout, and Turnover Intention among Managerial Staff from a Sino‐Japanese Joint Venture in Guangzhou, China

“…Job satisfaction has been considered the most representative antecedent variable before turnover intention, and this has been shown in many empirical studies 8) . It has been argued that low levels of hardiness (hardy personality), poor self-esteem, an external locus of control and an avoidant coping style typically constitute the profile of a stress-prone individual 5,9) .…”

Organizational nostalgia lowers turnover intentions by increasing work meaning: The moderating role of burnout.

“…Here, we focus on a particularly costly outcome, namely, turnover. Turnover is costly, because investments in human resources, such as training or expertise, are lost to the organization when employees decide to leave (Ton & Huckman, 2008;Van Dick et al, 2004).…”

“…We checked the effectiveness of the organizational-nostalgia induction with three items (Hepper et al, 2012;Wildschut et al, 2006) We assessed work meaning with the Positive Meaning subscale of the WAMI (Steger et al, 2012;α = .94, M = 4.78, SD = 1.71). We assessed turnover intentions with five items developed by Van Dick et al (2004). Sample items are: "I am thinking of quitting this job"…”

“…Here, we focus on a particularly costly outcome, namely, turnover. Turnover is costly, because investments in human resources, such as training or expertise, are lost to the organization when employees decide to leave (Ton & Huckman, 2008;Van Dick et al, 2004).Moreover, turnover impacts those who stay behind, as team productivity decreases (Argote, Insko, Yovetich, & Romero, 1995) and job satisfaction weakens (Krackhardt & Porter, 1985).Indeed, overall profits fall following employee departure (Ton & Huckman, 2008). As such, understanding the causes of turnover and retaining employees are highly relevant to organizational health.…”