Abstract
In recent years, the employee turnover rate for China’s youth labor market has been increasing, thus sparking many social issues. By incorporating social cognitive career theory, cognitive evaluation theory and a job demands-resources model, this study aims to compare levels of employee job engagement and examine the roles of motivation in enhancing job engagement and lowering turnover intention. Further, we try to reveal the moderating effects of feedback and self-efficacy in these processes. The research was divided into two stages. In December 2017, the survey was distributed to new employees in China with a total of 409 samples. A second survey was then distributed to the same respondents one year later. The data collection for stage 2 was completed in February 2019 with a sample size of 245. The empirical results showed that only self-efficacy moderated intrinsic motivation for job engagement. Both feedback and self-efficacy negatively moderated the influence of extrinsic motivation and positively moderated the influence of intrinsic motivation on turnover intention. The findings suggest that the key to improve employee engagement relies on maintaining their intrinsic motivation. In conclusion, implications for retaining talented young employees and suggestions for future research are discussed.
Highlights
The results show that the interaction’s regression coefficient of extrinsic motivation and self-efficacy was changed slightly, but it was not enough to show that self-efficacy had moderating effect on extrinsic motivation and job engagement. ∆R2 was not significant either
This study explored the relationship between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, job engagement and turnover intention, and the moderating effects of job engagement-based feedback and self-efficacy
The results showed that feedback positively moderated the relationship between intrinsic motivation and turnover intention, and negatively moderated extrinsic motivation
Summary
High turnover rate of talented personnel in China’s youth labor market has become a serious social issue in recent years. The problems suggest two urgent actions: increasing young employees’ job engagement during their working period, and reducing the turnover rate as much as possible To achieve these two desired results, we should understand the current condition of young labor force in China. The results are used to demonstrate the methodology to improve new employees’ job engagement and reduce the turnover intention of young employees in China’s labor market. This phenomena would be discussed on the basis of social cognitive career theory (SCCT) [3], cognitive evaluation theory (CET) [4], and the job demands-resources model (JD-R Model) [5]. After collecting the data from two different periods of time, the researchers analyzed, compared, discussed, and examined them with theoretical and practical results
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