Where does turnover intention collide?

Mobley's 1977 Intermediate linkages in the relationship between job satisfaction and employee turnover proposed a chain of steps between a dissatisfied worker and actual departure: thinking of quitting, weighing the expected payoff of searching, intending to search, intending to quit, and finally quitting. The intention to quit sits as the last thought before the act, the cause the model places nearest to leaving. This is the origin treatment: the other labels on this map, intent to leave, withdrawal cognition, quit propensity, all rework this single step. It is one construct, an employee's conscious intent to leave, wearing its first name.[1]

Unit

One worker's stated intent to quit, as a step in a withdrawal chain

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

A single item or short scale asking how likely the worker is to quit

Mobley, Griffeth, Hand, and Meglino's 1979 Review and conceptual analysis of the employee turnover process gathered the scattered findings and placed behavioral intention to quit as the most consistent immediate predictor of turnover, closer to leaving than either satisfaction or commitment. The review widened Mobley's single chain into a broad framework and fixed the label turnover intention for the whole field. This is not a different construct from Mobley's 1977 intent to quit: it is the same conscious intent to leave, given a canonical name and set at the front of the causal queue.[2]

Unit

A worker's behavioral intention to leave, as the proximal predictor of turnover

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Self-report intention items compared across the studies pooled in the review

Steel and Ovalle's 1984 A review and meta-analysis of research on the relationship between behavioral intentions and employee turnover pooled results across studies and found that a stated intention to leave predicted who actually left better than job satisfaction or organizational commitment did. Their treatment borrowed the language of the theory of reasoned action, casting intent to leave as the bridge from attitude to behavior. The label intent to leave here names the very same construct Mobley named, now examined for how tightly the intention tracks the later act rather than presented as a rival idea.[3]

Unit

A worker's behavioral intention, correlated against whether they later left

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Behavioral-intention scales validated against subsequent turnover records

Hom and Griffeth's 1991 Structural equations modeling test of a turnover theory reworked the label into withdrawal cognitions, a cluster of thinking about quitting, intending to search, and intending to quit, and showed with structural models that this cluster carried the effect of satisfaction and commitment onto actual leaving. The plural name stresses that the intent is one region of related thoughts rather than a lone item. Withdrawal cognition, quit propensity, and turnover intention all name the same underlying construct, a worker's conscious intent to leave, so the change of label marks a choice about measurement, not a new thing to measure.[4]

Unit

A cluster of quit-related thoughts and intentions in one worker

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

A multi-item withdrawal-cognitions index estimated inside a structural equation model