Factors Affecting Employee Turnover Intention and the Moderating Role of Gender: Evidence from the Laborer Category Employees Working in Katunayake Free Trade Zone of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Although the factors affecting employee turnover intention have been adequately studied in the extant literature in various contexts, minimum attention has been given to studying the actual effect of such factors on the role of gender, especially in the Free Trade Zones in Sri Lanka. Hence, the current study attempts to examine the effect of identified factors from literature, on employee turnover intention with the moderating role of gender on each antecedent. Predominantly adopting the deductive approach, quantitative strategy and cross-sectional time horizon, the study was conducted among a sample of 194 employees of the labourer category working in Katunayake Free Trade Zone via a survey questionnaire developed based on standard measurement scales. A simple random sampling technique was used to select the sample while the sample size was determined based on the Morgan table. Data analysis was done employing multiple regression analysis and the moderator analysis with Hayes process v3.5 macro in SPSS 26.0. Findings revealed that job satisfaction and organizational commitment have a negative relationship whereas job performance and job burnout adhere to a strong positive relationship with the employee turnover intention regardless of gender. Further, it is found that gender has no moderating effect on the hypothesized association. Accordingly, it is recommended for human resource professionals to focus more on each controllable factor affecting employee turnover intention which is more likely to convert into actual employee turnover adding costs to organizations in training and development, poor job performance, poor productivity, and emergency recruitments.