Workers' Turnover Intentions in Thai Corrugated Box Manufacturing Company
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: High turnover rate has always been a problem to many companies.Both direct and indirect costs for turnover can troublesome as they can hinder the companies' productivity and reduce the knowledge.Even though turnover intentions might not mean that employees will immediately quit an organization, but intentions have always been a strong predictor for turnover.This study tries to explore factors that are strongly related to turnover intentions.Based on an extensive review of the literatures on turnover intentions, I identified eleven factors, which are selected and divided into four factor levels: i.e., organizational, group, individual, and external levels.At organizational level, I include learning culture and collectivistic culture.For group level, team-member exchange, leader-member exchange, and group safety climate are chosen.Affective organizational commitment and organizational justice (including distributive, procedural, and interactional sub-dimensions) are selected for individual level factors.Lastly, at external level, I chose expectation of finding job alternatives and family's expectation of the job.Following the literature reviews, I attempted to empirically examine whether (and if so, how) these factors mentioned above are statically related to turnover intentions.I used a questionnaire survey method to collect quantitative data from workers in a corrugated box manufacturing company operating in Thailand.Using the data of 83 Thai workers, I executed a hierarchical linear regression analysis to examine the hypothesized positive or negative effects of said-factors on the workers' turnover intentions.The result of the analysis showed significant positive relationship of learning culture and significant negative relationships of collectivistic culture and family's expectation with turnover intentions.This suggests that workers tend to show less turnover intentions when they perceive that they work under the low learning and high collectivistic culture within the organization and their family members have greater expectations for the organization.Based on these findings, I tried to offer several implications for Thai corrugated box manufacturers to reduce turnover intentions.First, given the importance of workers' perceptions of organizational culture in the reduction of their turnover intentions, organizations should carefully pre-screen new hires and choose ones whose personality fit well with organizational culture.Second, considering that collectivistic rather than individualistic culture was found to reduce turnover intentions in the Thai manufacturing company, organization of this industry in Thailand should be encouraged to create visions and missions that would foster collectivistic values in order to increase the perception of collectivistic culture to the employees.Third, since the family's expectation for the job had played a significant role in reducing the worker's turnover intentions, I further performed a regression analysis to see what factors promote family's expectation.The analysis showed that affective commitment and procedural were positively and significantly related to family's expectation.This additional analysis combined with the main findings seems to imply that training can be used on managers to improve their skills for increasing their subordinates' affective organizational commitment and procedural justice.Enhancing the employees' affective organizational commitment and procedural should increase the family's expectation of the job, and in turn, the positive family's expectation will reduce turnover intentions.
Author: Panot Ratanaruengjumrune
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2472740185