An exploratory investigation into the relationships between promotion and turnover: a quasi-experimental longitudinal study

Journal of Management, Spring, 1993 by Mark W. Johnston, Rodger W. Griffeth, Scot Burton, Paula Phillips Carson

Measures

Organizational Commitment. Commitment was measured using the 15-item version of the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) developed by Porter, Steers, Mowday, and Boulian (1974). Following the guidelines set forth by Mowday, Steers, and Porter (1979) in which they examined the validity and reliability of the OCQ, an average value was calculated for the 15 five point scale items (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree).

Intrinsic Motivation. This construct was measured using six items from the scale developed by Lawler and Hall (1970). The six items were measured on a five point scale and then summed.

Job Anxiety. The construct was measured using seven items from the anxiety-stress scale developed by House and Rizzo (1972) to assess the amount of anxiety experienced by employees in the work environment. Each item used the 5-point strongly disagree to strongly agree scale described above. Individual items were then summed.

Job Involvement. The Lodahl and Kejner (1965) job involvement scale was used. It consists of six items measuring the degree to which a salesperson's work performance affects his/her self-esteem. Again, the construct was rated on a five point scale and the individual items were summed to arrive at a total score.

Propensity to Leave. Propensity to leave was measured using four items of Bluedorn's (1982) staying/leaving index. Respondents were asked: "How would you rate your chance of quitting in the next: three months, six months, sometime in the next year, sometime in the next two years." A seven point scale ranging from 1 (terrible) to 7 (excellent) was used and the individual items summed.

Satisfaction with Pay, Promotion, Supervisor, Work, and Co-Workers. Five facets of job satisfaction were measured using the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) by Smith, Kendall, and Hulin (1969). This instrument measures employee's attitudes toward five different facets of their employment by asking them to evaluate their satisfaction with pay (9 items), promotion (9 items), supervisor (18 items), work (18 items), and co-workers (18 items) and was scored in accordance with the instructions of the JDI (Smith et al., 1969).

Salary. This was measured by asking the participant to respond to the following statement, "$_________ is your yearly gross salary (including incentives)."

Turnover. Turnover was operationalized as a dichotomous variable (0 = stayer, 1 = leaver) and tracked for a period of one year following the completion of the second time period. The means, standard deviations, and coefficient alphas for each scale are reported in Table 1.(1)

TABULAR DATA OMITTED

Analyses

Given our purpose was to explore the work-related factors that differentiate promoted and non-promoted employees who stay or leave the organization, a naturally occurring, quasi-experimental, non-equivalent control group, pretest-posttest design (Cook & Campbell, 1979) was employed. While not optimal for inferring causality, this type of design is more rigorous than the norm, generally making it possible to rule out many more threats to internal validity (Cook & Campbell, 1979).