How Managers' Job Crafting Reduces Turnover Intention: The Mediating Roles of Role Ambiguity and Emotional Exhaustion.

Yuhyung Shin,Won-Moo Hur,Kyungdo Park,Hansol Hwang

doi:10.3390/ijerph17113972

Abstract

Despite the increasing body of research on job crafting, the relationship between managers’ job crafting and their turnover intention, as well as its intermediary mechanisms, has received relatively little attention from researchers. This study examined how managers’ job crafting negatively affected their turnover intention, focusing on role ambiguity and emotional exhaustion as underlying mediators. Data were collected from 235 store managers in South Korean food franchises. All study hypotheses were supported by regression-based path modeling. Controlling for role conflict and role ambiguity, we found a negative relationship between job crafting and role ambiguity, a positive relationship between role ambiguity and emotional exhaustion, and a positive relationship between emotional exhaustion and turnover intention. Our mediation analyses further revealed that controlling for role conflict and role overload, role ambiguity and emotional exhaustion partially and sequentially mediated the relationship between managers’ job crafting and their turnover intention. These findings have several implications for theory and practice.

Highlights

It is needless to say that managers play a pivotal role in creating and maintaining enhanced organizational performance
Scholars have noted that there is little research on the intermediary processes through which job characteristics are associated with turnover intention [4,8]. In response to this call for research, we identify role ambiguity and emotional exhaustion as mechanisms underlying the relationship between job crafting and managers’ turnover intention
Job crafting research grounded in the job demands-resources (JD-R) framework proposes increasing challenging job demands, structural job resources, and social job resources as the three core components of job crafting, which are associated with increased work engagement and decreased emotional exhaustion. Consistent with this line of research, our findings indicated that increasing challenging job demands, structural job resources, and social job resources is associated with decreased turnover intention by reducing role ambiguity and emotional exhaustion

Summary

Introduction

It is needless to say that managers play a pivotal role in creating and maintaining enhanced organizational performance. Of the various factors predicting turnover intention, job characteristics (i.e., task variety, task identity, feedback, autonomy, and task significance) have been identified as the antecedents of managers’. Prior research on managers’ turnover intention, has two major limitations While this line of research suggests that the motivating characteristics of a job can lead to a decrease in managers’ turnover intention [4], how to make their job motivating and meaningful has rarely been explored in the literature on managerial turnover. To fill this gap, in the present study, we isolate job crafting as a job-redesign technique that renders managers’ jobs motivating and meaningful, which, in turn, reduces their turnover intention. Distinct from traditional top-down job designs, job crafting is characterized by job holders’ own initiatives to alter the content and meaning of their job, as

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion