Turnover is linked to job involvement and organizational commitment

Telemarketing, Jun 1995 by Martin, Thomas N, Hafer, John C

Past research on voluntary turnover has produced very extensive and sophisticated models; however, a recent and more parsimonious model of turnover utilizes only two employee work attitudes to predict turnover propensity.(1) These two attitudes are job involvement and organizational commitment. The premise discussed here is that job involvement and organizational commitment interact jointly to affect turnover. For example, the job employees do helps them meet their intrinsic needs, such as satisfactorily performing a challenging job, which, in turn, increases their sense of competence. This leads to increasing employees' job involvement attitude. Likewise, the organization helps employees meet their social and other extrinsic reward needs, such as pay, fringe benefits and promotions. This leads to increasing employees' organizational commitment attitude.

In order to reduce the turnover propensity of employees, a manager's goals should be to get employees to identify with and care about their jobs. The greater the success at this, the more the job becomes important to each employee's self-image, which reflects the basic definition of job involvement.(2) It is important to get employees feeling positively about the organization that employs them so they identify with particular organizational goals, values, and culture, and want to maintain membership in it. This is defined as organizational commitment.(3) Employees with both high job involvement and organizational commitment should, therefore, have the most positive attitudes and the lowest propensity to quit because they are attracted by both the job and the organization. These employees feel they have a relationship with the company; the employee and company are part of the same whole.

Telemarketing sales employees develop both job involvement and organizational commitment attitudes. The operations of telemarketing firms are strongly characterized by a job/task environment where focused attention must be directed at performing detailed responsibilities for extended periods. The sales transaction performed by telemarketing sales employees always occurs over the phone with a faceless customer and, generally, occurs by following a computer-scripted sales presentation. This job and environment provide employees with limited autonomy to do the job outside the boundaries of the required format.

Telemarketing sales employees also develop attitudes about their employing organization, its goals and whether they wish to maintain membership in that organization. In a telemarketing firm, there are a variety of physical and psychological factors influencing an employee's attitude about organizational commitment. Physically being around other employees, or having more opportunities to coalesce in social groups, or having more opportunities for participation, autonomy and/or empowerment are a few factors that create a positive organizational commitment attitude. Thus, employees develop attitudes about both their job and their organization and these two attitudes have been found to interact in a person's decision to stay or leave the organization.(4)

Based upon their levels of job involvement and organizational commitment, employees could be classified as stars, corporate citizens, lone wolves or apathetics (see Table 1). (Table 1 omitted) Stars have high job involvement and organizational commitment and should have the lowest turnover propensity. Their jobs are important to their self-image and they strongly identify with their organization. Alternatively, apathetics have low involvement and commitment and should have the highest turnover propensity because their jobs are not important to them and they do not strongly identify with their organization. Lone wolves have high involvement, but low commitment. They are expected to have higher turnover propensity than corporate citizens, who have low involvement and high commitment, but not as much as apathetics. Lone wolves view their job as being important, but they do not strongly identify with their organization. They may leave if a more attractive job is offered to them by another organization, i.e., highly skilled TSRs feel they can switch organizations because of the transferrable nature of their skills. Corporate citizens do not identify with their jobs as much as they do with their organization. Their high organizational commitment makes staying with the company, in any reasonable capacity, their primary goal. This commitment can come from an ardent identification with and support for the organization's values, managers, its method of operation, or from accrued retirement, stocks, perks and seniority that have economic as well as intrinsic value.

Telemarketing firms have traditionally relied on a large proportion of part-time employees to fill phone sales jobs, which presents the opportunity to investigate the proposed model across both full- and part-time employees. A study was undertaken consisting of both part-time and full-time telemarketing sales employees employed in eight locations of a major, national telemarketing firm. There were 387 part-time employees and 114 full-time. Part-time was defined as anyone working less than 35 hours per week, and full-time as working more than 35 hours per week. Sixty-three percent of the part-time salespeople were females, 57 percent had completed high school, and 69 percent had worked for their organization less than three months. The average age was 27 years. In the full-time portion of the group, 60 percent were females, 59 percent had completed high school, and 67 percent had worked for their organization less than three months. The average age was 29 years.