Why Do Managers Leave Their Organization? Investigating the Role of Ethical Organizational Culture in Managerial Turnover

Abstract

The aim of the present longitudinal study was to quantitatively examine whether an ethical organizational culture predicts turnover among managers. To complement the quantitative results, a further important aim was to examine the self-reported reasons behind manager turnover, and the associations of ethical organizational culture with these reasons. The participants were Finnish managers working in technical and commercial fields. Logistic regression analyses indicated that, of the eight virtues investigated, congruency of supervisors, congruency of senior management, discussability, and sanctionability were negatively related to manager turnover. The results also revealed that the turnover group is not homogeneous, and that there are several different reasons for leaving. The reasons given for turnover were grouped into five different categories: (1) lay-off, (2) career challenges, (3) dissatisfaction with the job or organization, (4) organizational change, and (5) decreased well-being/motivation. ANCOVA analyses showed that those managers who stayed in their organization perceived their ethical culture to be stronger than those in turnover groups, and especially compared to groups 3 and 5. The results acquired through different methods complemented and confirmed each other, showing that by nurturing ethical virtues an organization can decrease job changes and encourage managers and supervisors to want to remain in their organization.

The Effect Locus of Control and Organizational Culture Toward Employee Performance with Organizational Commitments as Intervening Variable

“…Dai, Chan, & Yee (2018) defines organizational culture as organizational culture is unique characteristics that reflect an organization's goals and values, including assumptions, beliefs, norms, and ideas. Kangas, Kaptein, Huhtala, Lämsä, Pihlajasaari, & Feldt (2018) added that organizational culture is the ethical quality of a work environment, incorporating the experiences, presumptions, and expectations of the organization's members. Marliana (2015) concluded that organizational culture is an organizational value system adopted by members of the organization, which influences the way of working and behaving from the members of the organization.…”

Team Ethical Cultures Within an Organization: A Differentiation Perspective on Their Existence and Relevance

“…Given that the aim of our study is to find out in what respect team ethical cultures differ (when they do differ), we have to use the CEV model because so far it is the only multidimensional scale of ethical culture. To preserve construct validity, the choice of the CEV model also reflects its recent use in many empirical studies on ethical culture (e.g., Huhtala et al 2015Huhtala et al , 2016Huhtala et al , 2018Kangas et al 2016Kangas et al , 2017Pučėtaitė et al 2016;Riivari and Lämsä 2014;Zaal et al 2017).…”

The shortened Corporate Ethical Virtues scale: Measurement invariance and mean differences across two occupational groups

“…The CEV scale has received empirical evidence for broad generalizability and support for both convergent and discriminant validity. This scale has been used in different national contexts: the Netherlands (Kaptein, 2008), Finland (Huhtala, Feldt, Lämsä, Mauno, & Kinnunen, 2011;Kangas, Feldt, Huhtala, & Rantanen, 2014;Kangas, Muotka, Huhtala, Mäkikangas, & Feldt, 2015;Riivari & Lämsä, 2014;Riivari, Lämsä, Kujala, & Heiskanen, 2012), and Lithuania (Novelskaite & Pucetaite, 2014), both in longitudinal Kangas et al, 2016) and in cross-sectional studies (e.g., Huhtala, Tolvanen, Mauno, & Feldt, 2014;Kaptein, 2011), and the structure of the original scale has been widely supported by these studies (see Table 1). DeBode et al (2013) developed a shortened version of Kaptein's (2008) CEV-58 scale.…”