Abstract
In addition to well-being, workplace learning has gained increasing interest in supporting employee and organizational development and success. Focusing on specific factors affecting workplace learning and well-being, this study examines the links between individual factors (basic psychological need satisfaction) and environmental factors (expansiveness of the workplace as a learning environment), job satisfaction, and turnover intention. Survey data were collected from the employees (N = 153) of two Finnish engineering companies from 2018 to 2019. The data were analyzed with correlation analysis and structural equation modeling (observed and latent variable path analysis). Results show that a more expansive workplace learning environment is associated with higher satisfaction of basic psychological needs. High levels of autonomy and competence need satisfaction, versatile work, promotion of learning, and acknowledgment of skills are positively associated with job satisfaction. Higher levels of autonomy and non-routine work tasks are associated with lower turnover intention. The results indicate that turnover intention is not necessarily associated with only negative conditions or perceptions, as high levels of competence and participation and understanding of the workplace are positively associated with turnover intention. The findings provide information about workplace factors that are relevant to improving employees’ workplace learning and well-being. The results also highlight the ambiguous nature of turnover intention.
Highlights
There is a longstanding consensus among researchers that employee well-being affects job attitudes relevant to employees’ professional development and organizational success
This study aims to raise both practical and theoretical notions by examining connections of factors influencing learning and well-being in work while increasing understanding of workforce retention and development. We address these issues with the following research questions: (RQ1) Is employees’ basic psychological need satisfaction (BPNS) in the workplace associated with job satisfaction (JS) and turnover intention (TI)?; (RQ2) Is the expansiveness of employees’ workplace as a learning environment (WLE) associated with JS and TI?; (RQ3) Are the employees’ level of BPNS and the expansiveness of WLE, when examined together, related to JS and TI, and which dimensions of BPNS and WLE have the strongest relationships with JS and TI? In this study, the 3-P model of workplace learning (Tynjälä, 2013) is applied to illustrate the different levels of factors connected to workplace learning in a sociocultural environment
Positioning our constructs in the 3-P model of workplace learning (Tynjälä, 2013) and the model of informal learning behaviors (Cerasoli et al, 2018), we examined the levels of BPNS and WLE expansiveness of employees of two companies representing the Finnish engineering sector, the connections between these individual factor dimensions (BPNS), environmental factor dimensions (WLE), and important job attitudes reflecting employee well-being and organizational commitment (JS and TI), and the associations of BPNS and WLE with JS and TI together after controlling for participants’ organization, gender, age, and total work experience
Summary
There is a longstanding consensus among researchers that employee well-being affects job attitudes relevant to employees’ professional development and organizational success. Research on employee job attitudes has a long tradition in organizational psychology (Judge & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2012). This tradition stems from results pointing to the association between job attitudes and organizational behaviors and performance. Two highly researched job attitudes are job satisfaction (JS) and turnover intention (TI). JS is often regarded as the most important employee attitude (Saari & Judge, 2004), while employee retention and turnover have been highly acknowledged issues in organizational research over the last few decades (Rubenstein et al, 2018). Concerns about retention rates of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professionals have been raised in the US (Iammartino et al, 2016)
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