Determinants of the Turnover Intention of Construction Professionals: A Mediation Analysis

Mehmet Nurettin Uğural,Mariusz Urbański,Heyecan Giritli

doi:10.3390/su12030954

Abstract

The voluntary turnover rate of qualified professionals is both a critical issue and a priority issue that affects organizations in different ways. The construction industry has a set of very specific and unique characteristics that demarcates it from all other sectors. This situation is related with strong precariousness and employee turnover, as well as the extensive practice of subcontracting. Furthermore, the construction sector, with its project-based production, is more vulnerable to voluntary turnover intention. Therefore, we aimed, in this study, to determine the key factors that contribute to the voluntary turnover intentions of qualified construction professionals. In this paper, the impact of individual-level value orientations on turnover intention in the construction settings, focusing on the mediating effect of external prestige and organizational identification, are investigated. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is employed to estimate the causal relationships between the turnover intention and other research variables. The analyses are based on questionnaire responses from 441 construction professionals living in Istanbul. The findings indicate that an individual difference in the self-construal is related to turnover intention indirectly by virtue of employees’ perceptions of organizational prestige. Organizational identification also partially mediated the relationship between the self-construal and the turnover intention.

Highlights

Understanding turnover intention and finding answers to the central questions of organizational studies, i.e., “why employees want to leave their organizations” or “why they continue to remain”, [1,2] has captured the interest of a number researchers for a long time
This paper focus on three individual-level constructs: (1) organizational identification, which is the cognitive and/or emotional feelings of employees about their organizational membership, (2) perceived external prestige, which refers to employees’ belief of how outsiders perceive the organization, and (3) a self-construal, which is conceptualized as a “constellation of thoughts, feelings, and actions concerning one’s relationship to others, and self as distinct from others” [6]
The following tests have been used to determine the health of the experimental models in line with the recommendations of Hair et al [50]: a Comparative Fit Index (CFI), a Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), a Goodness of Fit Index (GFI), and the Chi-Square (χ2) value and Degrees of Freedom

Summary

Introduction

Understanding turnover intention and finding answers to the central questions of organizational studies, i.e., “why employees want to leave their organizations” or “why they continue to remain”, [1,2] has captured the interest of a number researchers for a long time. Along with the term turnover, concepts like voluntary and involuntary movements across organizational boundaries come across. The employee initiates a voluntary movement of turnover, while involuntary turnover is initiated by the organization for various reasons, such as nonperformance. Many studies [5] have focused on the turnover intention (TOI) itself, rather than on the actual turnover [6]. This is due to the difficulties of collecting data about actual turnover behavior. There is a reason to argue that researchers must rely on employee TOI as a proxy construct for actual employee turnover

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion