Essay Example on Predictors of turnover intention in the increasingly competitive construction Environment

This study has highlighted the importance of understanding the predictors of turnover intention in the increasingly competitive construction environment Since predicting and preventing costly turnover of talented professionals are key challenges facing firms in the construction sector where the employee turnover rates are fairly high retaining talented human resources is of importance for organizations performance and competitive advantage This study tried to explain why and how the two components of self orientation organizational identification and perceived external prestige differently explain turnover intentions of construction professionals in the Turkish construction industry In particular we had two primary objectives in conducting this research Our first objective was to better understand the predictors of turnover intention The results did not support the existence of distinct and complementary structure of the BID In other words relational and individuation dimensions were found to be correlated as bipolar opposites This finding is inconsistent with the results of other studies that have used the BID scale in Turkey the United States and Canada e g İmamoğlu 1998 2002 İmamoğlu Karakitapoglu Aygün 2004 Kurt 2002a 2002b 

It also raises the question of why self construal results appear so inconsistent from study to study Scanning the literature reveals several reasons for questioning the validity of self construal scales In their meta analysis Levine et al 2003 criticize experiments that rely on student samples in previous studies on self construal and agree that predicted cultural differences should be more evident in older adults than in college students It has also been found that individual self correlates positively and relational self correlates negatively with turnover intention If the two scales are orthogonal this should not happen Hara and Kim 2001 Accordingly in this study relatedness and individuation were reported as endpoints of a single continuum Levine et al 2003 draw attention to whether situational primes influence respondents scores on self construal scales Therefore the findings discussed above might be interpreted in the context of the construction industry 

There are indeed reasons to believe that construction professionals i e architecture and engineering occupations have their own common occupational culture Schein 1996 because of their predominantly project based work The project based nature of the industry has been identified as a major reason for turnover intentions This raises some doubts as to the applicability of the BID to construction professionals in Turkey Thus some caution is called for in generalizing the findings The results of this present study appear to show that not only PEP and OID are positively associated with each other but also they are significantly negatively related to turnover intentions That is to say those individuals high in OID are necessarily those who perceive their company as prestigious and that employees with high PEP and high OID are likely to show low turnover intentions Van Dick et al 2004 Cole and Bruch 2006 Reiche 2009 Congruent with previous studies Riordan et al 1997 Carmeli and Freund 2002 Carmeli et al 2006 Brammer et al 2007 this study extends the generalizability of the critical role of PEP on enhancing organizational identification Our findings are also consistent with the literature showing the negative relationship between PEP and OID and employees turnover intentions In view of key employees being vital to the prosperity of firms in construction these findings stress that construction industry firms need to consider carefully the influence of external prestige perceptions of key employees in their organizational identification Glynn 1998 distinguished between the trait approach of OID which views it largely as an individual disposition that tends to generalize across contexts and the state approach which makes it a much more flexible and context driven individual characteristic 

Our research provides support for the state approach in the sense that OID could develop coherently with PEP because PEP and OID were found to be correlated in the construction professional s sample Our second objective was to examine whether PEP and OID mediated the relations between self construal orientations and turnover intention PEP fully mediated the relationship between relational self RLTS and turnover intention The inclusion of PEP reduces turnover intentions by promoting satisfaction with being a member of the organization This result highlights the importance of PEP in providing the psychological glue which increases individuals commitment to their organization PEP was also found to partially mediate the relation between individual self INDS and turnover intention These findings indicate that individual differences in self orientations may be related to turnover intention indirectly through perceptions of organizational prestige In the same vein OID not only fully mediated the relations between relational self and turnover intention but also partially mediated the relation between individual self and turnover intention Our research adds to the body of knowledge regarding potential mediating variables in the relations between self orientations and turnover intentions in construction settings Finally the present study provides evidence for generalizing certain constructs and relationships that have been supported in the western cultures to the cultural environment of construction context in Turkey The generalizability of self construal theory stems from the view that basic needs are universal Ryan and Deci 2000