Should I Stay or Should I Go? Explaining Turnover Intentions with Organizational Identification and Job Satisfaction*
| Author | Patrick A. Tissington,Oliver Ahlswede,Ulrich Wagner,Jost Stellmacher,Kai Moltzen,Oliver Christ,Martin Hauptmeier,Corinna Höhfeld,Rolf Van Dick,Cornelia Grubba |
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2004.00424.x |
RESEARCH NOTE
Should I Stay or Should I Go? Explaining
Turnover Intentions with Organizational
Identification and Job Satisfaction
*
Rolf Van Dick, Oliver Christw, Jost Stellmacherw, Ulrich Wagnerw,
Oliver Ahlswedew, Cornelia Grubbaw, Martin Hauptmeierw,
Corinna Ho
¨hfeldw, Kai Moltzenwand Patrick A. Tissington
Aston Business School, Aston University, Work & Organizational Psychology Group, Aston Triangle,
Birmingham B4 7ET, UK and wPhilipps-Universita
¨t Marburg, Fachbereich Psychologie AG Sozialpsychologie,
Gutenbergstr. 18, 35032 Marburg, Germany
Corresponding author mail: r.vandick@aston.ac.uk
The social identity approach is a powerful theoretical framework for the understanding
of individuals’ behaviour. The main argument is that individuals think and act on behalf
of the group they belong to because this group membership adds to their social identity,
which partly determines one’s self-esteem. In the organizational world, social identity
and self-categorization theories state that a strong organizational identification is
associated with low turnover intentions. Because identification is the more general
perception of shared fate between employee and organization, we propose that the
relationship between identification and turnover will be mediated by job satisfaction as
the more specific evaluation of one’s task and working conditions. In four samples we
found organizational identification feeding into job satisfaction, which in turn predicts
turnover intentions.
Introduction
Over the past few years, several papers have been
published debatingthe usefulness of social identity
for the understanding of organizational behaviour
in a range of domains (Cornelissen, 2002a, 2002b;
Gioia, Schultz and Corley, 2002a, 2002b; Haslam,
Postmes and Ellemers, 2003; Herriot and Scott-
Jackson, 2002; Ryan and Haslam, forthcoming).
In line with the arguments provided by Haslam
and colleagues (2003), this paper aims to demon-
strate this usefulness by presenting empirical data
on the relationships between organizational iden-
tification, job satisfaction and one of the most
important phenomena of organizational beha-
viour – turnover intentions. Turnover is a major
problem for many organizations today where
turnover is often extremelycostly for the employer
– particularly in jobs which offer higher education
and extensive on the job training, (Cascio, 1982).
There is also experimental evidence for the
negative effects of turnover. Argote, Insko,
Yovetich and Romero (1995), for instance, found
in a study with three-person groups, that groups
*
We would like to thank Jonathan Crawshaw, Michael
Grojean, Daan Van Knippenberg and Patricia Zapf for
their very valuable advice on a previous version of this
paper. We are also grateful to the editor as well as three
anonymous reviewers for their precise comments. Parts
of this paper were presented at the 19
th
Annual
Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organiza-
tional Psychology, Chicago, Illinois, 2–4 April 2004. A
previous version was published in the Aston Business
School’s Working Paper Series (RP 0317).
British Journal of Management, Vol. 15, 351–360 (2004)
r2004 British Academy of Management
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