Antecedents of employee turnover intention: a case study of organization in China

Although China has a population of over 1.3 billion, there is a growing shortage of qualified employees for the past three decades. China is experiencing a double-digit turnover rate and high turnover intention. Turnover intention and its antecedents, namely, perceived organizational support (POS), affective commitment, distributive justice, trust in organization and job security, were studied in this research with a case study of a FIE (foreign invested enterprise) manufacturing company in Guangdong of China. Two variations of conceptualized framework were developed and investigated using the technique of structural equation modeling. The result suggests that distributive justice, trust in organization and job security have negative impacts on turnover intention. Moreover, affective commitment mediates the impact of job security on turnover intention. The result also indicates that POS has an impact on affective commitment instead of affecting turnover intention directly. With the presence of affective commitment, the direct impact of POS on turnover intention becomes insignificant. As a result, POS and affective commitment mediate the impacts of both distributive justice and trust in organization on turnover intention.