An investigation of the antecedents of turnover intention for manufacturing plant managers

Shows how a survey of 216 plant managers is used to develop and test an integrated model of their turnover intentions. The model incorporates role stressors, task characteristics, job involvement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment as predictors of intention to stay in the organization. The results provide moderate support for the proposed model and show that organizational commitment had a direct and positive effect on plant managers’ intention to stay with their organization. Indirect effects on intention to stay were found for job satisfaction, job involvement, task characteristics and role stressors. Results show that job satisfaction is considered the most important factor directly affecting organizational commitment, while job involvement also had a direct effect on organizational commitment. Role stressors were found to be the most disfunctional variables affecting satisfaction of the plant managers. The results also indicated that task characteristics play an important role in predicting job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and intention to stay. Presents implications for top management to improve job satisfaction, organization commitment and retention of plant managers.