Alternative Job Research Articles

Some Reservations About a “Rational Choice” Model Predicting Employee Turnover

Professor Russell proposes a decision model of turnover in which the attractiveness of the current job is compared with that of an alternative. In turn, an employee chooses the option with the highest judged attractiveness. For example, “Employees make decisions to quit based on the relative attractiveness of their current job compared to alternative jobs or activities” (2013, p. 163). The attractiveness of one's current job and alternative are estimated by a regression equation assessing various attributes of the two targets (i.e., current job and alternative). Evoking March and Simon (1958) for a theoretical foundation, Professor Russell offers a subjectively “rational model” for the choice to stay or leave based on expectancy and expected value type decision models. In his empirical work, he uses a “policy capturing” simulation to identify how new hires personally weigh various job attributes when deciding whether they would quit hypothetical jobs varying in those attributes (Russell & Van Sell, 2012). When these weights are applied to employees' actual survey perceptions of the levels of job attributes, the resulting “simulated turnover intention” score predicts turnover better than a survey measure of quit intentions or job attributes alone. The inference is that turnover scholars can make substantial progress toward the prediction of actual turnover by using this model.

Managers’ Choices of Evaluation Criteria in Promotion Decisions: The Importance of Subjectivity in Alternative Job Assignments

In this study, we investigate the choice of performance measures in promotion decisions. In particular, we examine the extent to which managers incorporate different performance measures for different types of job assignment. Based on a simple theoretical framework, we predict that, in making promotion decisions, the weight on current job performance decreases with increases in the change in tasks upon promotion, while the weight on subjective assessments of ability increases. This result basically follows from the premise that, with increased changes in tasks between hierarchical levels, the ability to master the current job says little about the ability needed in the next job, which makes current job performance less informative and increases the emphasis on subjective assessments. Using panel data of a retail bank, we find that individual managers behave according to our predictions. By examining the choice of performance measures in promotion decisions, we are able to provide unique insights into the incentive versus sorting roles of promotions, which has important implications for performance measurement and incentive system design.

The impact of training and development on employees' skills enhancement and their subsequent intention to quit: The moderating role of perceived alternative job opportunities

Most of the studies have looked at the impact of employer-provided training on employee level outcomes and subsequently on organizational performance. However, the impact of training opportunities provided to employees on their intentions to leave has received far less attention. The present study is aimed at bridging the gap and highlighting the role of these development opportunities provided to employees on their skills enhancement. Since this skills enhancement results in their worth enhancement for the firm’s rivals, there is a greater likelihood that it will ultimately result in employees’ increased intentions to leave their existing employer. This is a systematic study to increase the understanding of employees’ intention to leave. Key words: Development, opportunities, turnover, enhancement, skills, capabilities.

Proprietorship and unemployment in the United States

Unemployment and proprietorship can be related in several ways. As unemployment increases, individuals with fewer job alternatives may choose to start their own business resulting in an increase in proprietorship. Alternatively, if an increase in unemployment is the result of a depressed economy, higher unemployment may lead to less demand for the products and services of proprietors, thus reducing proprietorship. Finally, greater proprietorship may lead to future increases in employment as these businesses grow. This can potentially reduce unemployment in the long run. We apply a panel vector autoregressive model to unemployment and proprietorship data from the U.S. states for the years 1976 to 2009 to examine if these effects are apparent in the data. We find that unemployment Granger causes proprietorship, but proprietorship does not Granger cause unemployment.

Abolition of Commercial Motorbikes and Its Implication on Transportation and Criminality in Calabar Metropolis

The study examined the abolition of commercial motorbikes and its implications on transportation and criminality in Calabar Metropolis. The main objective of the study was to assess the implications associated with the abolition of commercial motorbikes as a means of transport and its effect on criminality in Calabar Metropolis. To achieve this objective, the study elicited data through questionnaire from 984 randomly selected respondents. Simple percentages and chi-square were employed to analyze elicited data at 0.05 levels of significance. The findings revealed that factors such as upsurge in criminal activities, rise in traffic accidents, traffic congestion and recklessness on the part of the operators of commercial motorbikes among others account for the abolition of motorbikes as a means of transportation in Calabar Metropolis. The study findings also revealed that the abolition of commercial motorbikes resulted in the delay of workers getting vehicles to their workplaces, increased in transportation fare charges and quarrel amongst commuters as they struggle to access few available transport vehicles. Furthermore, the study findings revealed that the abolition has resulted to an increase in criminal activities such as armed robbery, pick-pocketing, theft and snatching of valuables. The study recommends among others: the provision of alternative jobs for the displaced youths who have been affected by the government action, government should partner with private sectors to establish avoidable transport system for the masses and government should ensure that urban taxi cabs maintained approved standard transport fares in all routes to avoid arbitrary and unavoidable charges.

Gender, Personal Traits, and Entrepreneurial Intentions

Gender differences in entrepreneurial intentions and agentic traits frequently linked to entrepreneurship (locus of control, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, risk-taking propensity, and proactiveness) were examined using a sample of 535 women and 283 men, all of them university students. Self-report data were collected through a questionnaire consisting of several scales. MANOVA results showed gender differences in entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial self-efficacy, men feeling more efficient to create a new venture and being more prone to do so than women. Nevertheless, major area and age explained differences in the variables studied better than gender. All this evidence supports the idea that the lower entrepreneurial activity observed in women refers not only to the verifiable creation of a new business, but that it extends to the first phase relating to career choice and the formation of intentions in this respect. This raises the need to approach the problem of scarce entrepreneurial initiatives in women from the very early stages of career choice, when the person is still weighing the different job alternatives and making decisions about them.

Organizational citizenship behaviour and employee retention: how important are turnover cognitions?

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between perceived job alternatives, intention to search, intention to leave and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), with a view to determining the extent to which these variables are related. Two surveys using separate samples (Study 1, n = 651, and Study 2, n = 226) were used. First, in both studies, perceived job alternatives provided a better account of OCB towards the organization (sportsmanship and civic virtue) than OCB towards individuals (helping and altruism). Second, the results of Studies 1 and 2 indicate that the relationships between OCB and intention to search and between OCB and intention to quit are different. The findings suggest that one part of the research model appears to be generalizable, while the other part appears to be explained by the context of employment. The implications of the findings are discussed.

Couples' Labour Supply Responses to Job Loss: Boom and Recession Compared

We examine how couples’ labour supply behaviour in the UK responds to a job loss by one partner, using the Labour Force Survey to compare the period of growth of 1995-2007 to the Great Recession and its aftermath of 2008-11. In single earner couples during the recession, both men and women substantially increased their job search activity following a partner’s job loss, while the increase in search during the boom was smaller (and non-existent for men). However, the increase in job search during recession did not appear to translate into more success in finding work for either men or women. Among dual earner couples, we find little evidence that individuals searched for alternative jobs or tried to increase their hours if their partner lost their job, except that women working part-time were more likely to start looking for another job. Both men and women were more likely to quit their job voluntarily if their partner lost their job, but the recession seems to have made people more cautious about voluntarily quitting their job. We find little evidence that people react in advance of job losses, suggesting that unemployment typically comes as a surprise.

A Comparative Performance Study for Compute Node Sharing

We introduce a methodology for the study of the application-level performance of time-sharing parallel jobs on a set of compute nodes in high performance clusters and report our findings. We assume that parallel jobs arriving at a cluster need to share a set of nodes with the jobs of other users, in that they must compete for processor time in a time-sharing manner and other limited resources such as memory and I/O in a space-sharing manner. Under the assumption, we developed a methodology to simulate job arrivals to a set of compute nodes, and gather and process performance data to calculate the percentage slowdown of parallel jobs. Our goal through this study is to identify a better combination of jobs that minimize performance degradations due to resource sharing and contention. Through our experiments, we found a couple of interesting behaviors for overlapped parallel jobs, which may be used to suggest alternative job allocation schemes aiming to reduce slowdowns that will inevitably result due to resource sharing on a high performance computing cluster. We suggest three job allocation strategies based on our empirical results and propose further studies of the results using a supercomputing facility at the San Diego Supercomputing Center.

Breaches of past promises, current job alternatives, and promises of future idiosyncratic deals: Three-way interaction effects on organizational commitment

This article examines the three-way interaction effect of breaches of past promises, current job alternatives, and promises of future idiosyncratic deals on affective organizational commitment. Specifically, we posit that the negative relationship between breaches of past promises and affective organizational commitment is strongest when employees are promised idiosyncratic deals in the future and when they perceive that few job alternatives are currently available elsewhere. Data collected from 196 managers at two points in time over a one-year period support the proposed three-way interaction effect. This article highlights the importance of differentiating fulfillment of past contract obligations from promises of future idiosyncratic deals in further research on psychological contract breaches.

The impact of quality of work life on job embeddedness and affective commitment and their co‐effect on turnover intention of nurses

To verify with empirical evidence the hypothesised relation and the effect of quality of work life, job embeddedness and affective commitment on turnover intention of clinical nurses in China. High turnover of the nursing workforce in healthcare organisations is a difficult and recurring problem in China as well as in many other countries in the world. It leads to great waste of resources and increases management cost. Developing and retaining the nursing workforce, which is a major challenge faced by human resources practitioners in hospitals and public health agencies, also becomes a subject of interest for management studies. Most of the literature about voluntary turnover focused on such traditional measures as job satisfaction and job alternatives in the past. The introduction of such new concepts as quality of work life, job embeddedness and affective commitment, which views the issue from a much broader and comprehensive spectrum, made a great breakthrough in the turnover study. In this study, we selected quality of work life, job embeddedness and affective commitment - three of the most important factors in employer-employee relations - and analysed the interaction between each one of them, as well as their co-effect on turnover intention of Chinese nurses. Cross-sectional survey and structural equation modelling were applied in studying the self-report questionnaires distributed to 1000 nurses employed in five large-scale government-owned hospitals in Heilongjiang Province, Northeast China. Our study confirmed the hypothesised positive relation of quality of work life with job embeddedness and affective commitment and the hypothesised negative relation of quality of work life with turnover intention, that is, high quality of work life perceived by the nurses enhances their job embeddedness and affective commitment and thus reduces their intention to leave the job. The effect of quality of work life is positive on job embeddedness and affection commitment and negative on turnover intention. Nurse managers should pay great attention to the nurses' perception of quality of work life, and make great efforts in developing strategies and projects that can strengthen the nurses' embeddedness or connection with the job.

The Grass is Always Greener on The Other Side: A Test of Present and Alternative Job Utility on IT Professionals’ Turnover

The costs associated with the turnover of information technology (IT) professionals continue to draw the attention of IT managers and researchers. Although a weak labor market has limited the quantity of turnover, organizations' most skilled IT personnel are still coveted and valuable resources. These IT professionals are also those most equipped to leave their firm and find new work. In order to reduce costs, retain key employees, and manage turnover, managers need to understand the factors that drive quitting behavior. The research model suggests that the utility of present and alternative IT work are key cognitive influences on an IT professional's decision to search for new employment, intention to quit, and, ultimately, turnover. We test the research model using longitudinal data that include actual turnover behavior. The research model explains 44% of the variance in intention to quit and 13% of the variance in actual turnover. After establishing the influence of utility on the quitting process, we conduct additional analyses to identify the elements of present and alternative job utility that are the most salient for IT professionals' quitting processes. From the additional analyses, we derive specific guidance to practice on the management of IT professionals.

How to Increase Job Satisfaction and Reduce Turnover Intentions in the Family Firm

The authors define family–business embeddedness as confluence of values and objectives stemming from the overlapping institutional contexts—family, business, and symbolic—in the family firm. Hence, the family–business embeddedness perspective investigates the effect of integrating divergent institutional values and objectives, economic and noneconomic, on family firm’s performance. The authors contend that family–business embeddedness and work centrality will magnify family employees’ job satisfaction, whereas superior job alternatives will produce an opposite effect. In turn, job satisfaction will be negatively related to family employees’ turnover intentions. A survey of 111 family employees from 70 family firms in the United States supported the hypotheses.

Integrating turnover reasons and shocks with turnover decision processes

We interviewed and classified 186 quitters from many jobs and organizations via a theoretically-based protocol into five decision process types. We then tested exploratory hypotheses comparing users of these types on their propensity to report certain turnover reasons and turnover shocks. “Impulsive-type quitters,” with neither a job offer in hand nor turnover plan when they quit, reported poor management, work stress, and family demands as frequent turnover reasons, with manager conflicts and family events as frequent shocks. “Comparison quitters,” who had a job offer in hand and no plan, reported pay and advancement opportunities as top reasons with information about an alternative job being the most frequent shock. “Preplanned quitters,” who had a definite plan to quit well in advance, reported relocation and life/career changes as frequent reasons, with increasing family demand, relocation, and school starting as frequent shocks. “Satisficing quitters,” who made a plan conditional on getting an acceptable job offer, reported pay, poor management, work responsibilities, and work schedules as frequent reasons. Implications of these and other findings are discussed.

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Comparing Entrepreneurship Intention:A Multigroup Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Unemployment is one of the main social and economic problems that many countries face nowadays. One strategic way to overcome this problem is by fostering entrepreneurship spirit especially for unem-ployment graduates. Entrepreneurship is becoming an alternative Job for students after they graduate. This is because entrepreneurship of-fers major benefits, such as setting up one’s own business and the pos-sibility of having significant financial rewards than working for others. Entrepreneurship is then offered by many universities. This research applies the theory of planned behavior (TPB) by incorporating attitude toward success as an antecedent variable of the attitude to examine students’ intention to become an entrepreneur. The objective of this research is to compare entrepreneurship intention between business students and non-business students. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data for this study. Questionnaires were distributed to respondents by applying the drop-off/pick-up method. A number of 294 by questionnaires were used in the analysis. Data were analyzed by using structural equation modeling. Two out of four hypotheses were confirmed. These hypotheses are the relationship between the attitude toward becoming an entrepreneur and the intention to try becoming an entrepreneur, and the relationship perceived behavioral control and intention to try becoming an entrepreneur. This paper also provides a discussion and offers directions for future research. DOI : https://doi.org/10.21632/irjbs.5.1.57-71 Keywords: theory of planned beintention, entrepreneur

Comparing Entrepreneurship Intention: A Multigroup Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Unemployment is one of the main social and economic problems that many countries face nowadays. One strategic way to overcome this problem is by fostering entrepreneurship spirit especially for unem-ployment graduates. Entrepreneurship is becoming an alternative Job for students after they graduate. This is because entrepreneurship of-fers major benefits, such as setting up ones own business and the pos-sibility of having significant financial rewards than working for others. Entrepreneurship is then offered by many universities. This research applies the theory of planned behavior (TPB) by incorporating attitude toward success as an antecedent variable of the attitude to examine students intention to become an entrepreneur. The objective of this research is to compare entrepreneurship intention between business students and non-business students. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data for this study. Questionnaires were distributed to respondents by applying the drop-off/pick-up method. A number of 294 by questionnaires were used in the analysis. Data were analyzed by using structural equation modeling. Two out of four hypotheses were confirmed. These hypotheses are the relationship between the attitude toward becoming an entrepreneur and the intention to try becoming an entrepreneur, and the relationship perceived behavioral control and intention to try becoming an entrepreneur. This paper also provides a discussion and offers directions for future research.DOI :https://doi.org/10.21632/irjbs.5.1.57-71Keywords: theory of planned beintention, entrepreneur

The Use of Alternative Preference Elicitation Methods in Complex Discrete Choice Experiments

We analyse stated preference data over nursing jobs collected from two leading types of best-worst discrete choice experiments (DCEs): a traditional DCE involving choice over alternative jobs (BWL) and a newly-developed DCE where respondents choose best and worst job attributes (BWT). The latter allows identification of additional utility parameters and is believed to be cognitively easier. Results suggest that respondents place greater value on pecuniary over non-pecuniary gains in traditional DCE. Rather than caused by the use of heuristics in BWL, we find that respondents find it difficult and/or are reluctant to directly compare money with other attributes in BWT.

Impact of Joint Forest Management on Socio-economic development of rural people: A case study in Shumeriyal and Doban villages of Kamaraj Forest Division, Kupwara (J&K)

All forest land area in Jammu and Kashmir is State owned and are under the technical and administrative control of the State Forest Department. The department is, therefore, managing these forests in the interest of the State. The State interest has too often been expressed as an extension of the policies of the State and Central Govt. which usually focus on exploitation of these forests for the overall development of the State, as a result of which the local communities which inhabit the forest under exploitation are marginalized. Participatory Forest Management got its formal shape in the year 1990. A need has arise to evaluate the impact of this management tool. 58 VFCs are functioning both with the Social Forestry projects and the territorial wings of the forest departments for the rehabilitation of the forest land of Kupwara District. A study was taken up in Shumeriyal and Doban Village committees to assess the impact of Joint Forest Management on the socio-economic development of rural people and to identify the prime ingredients of this programme responsible for bringing about the desired change. It was observed that the household income has considerable increased due to alternative job opportunities, agriculture production has increased, reduction in distance travelled and time spent for fuelwood and fodder collection and institution building and other constructions (Entry point activities) has paved the way for sustainability of the whole process. For the present study, the two VFCs selected, one VFC (Shumeriyal) which is only 6 kms from the district headquarter Kupwara having the population of 5800 souls and the another VFC (Doban) which is near about 60 kms away from the district headquarter having population of 2740 souls. During the present study it was observed that the Shumeriyal village is more developed than that of Doban village due to proper transport facilities, communication facilities, land productivity, drainage system, education and employment, During the present study it was observed that the forest villages which are near to the District headquarter are well developed than those areas which are far beyond the District headquarter.

COMPETITION AND RELATIONAL CONTRACTS: THE ROLE OF UNEMPLOYMENT AS A DISCIPLINARY DEVICE

When workers are faced with the threat of unemployment, their relationship with a particular firm becomes valuable. As a result, a worker may comply with the terms of a relational contract that demands high effort even when performance is not enforceable by a third party. But can relational contracts motivate high effort when workers can easily find alternative jobs? We examine how competition for labor affects the emergence of relational contracts and their effectiveness in overcoming moral hazard in the labor market. We show that effective relational contracts do emerge in a market with excess demand for labor. Long-term relationships turn out to be less frequent when there is excess demand for labor than they are in a market characterized by exogenous unemployment. However, stronger competition for labor does not impair labor market efficiency: higher wages induced by competition lead to higher effort out of concerns for reciprocity.