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Abstract
The researchers in past have long established the relevance of employee work engagement and their desired organizational outcomes all over the world. Little or no such research has focused on understanding the linkage between work engagement and employee turnover intention particularly in a developing country like India. The present study, conducted in Indian service sector match service employee perception about several forms of work engagement (vigour, dedication and absorption) with esprit de corps and their turnover intentions. The study revealed that engagement exerts its direct positive impact on service employees' esprit de corps and negative impact on their turnover intentions. Using path analysis, the empirical results also indicated indirect impact of employee work engagement on their turnover intention via the employee esprit de corps, thus, highlighting the role of employee esprit de corps as effective intermediating variable in the causal relationships.
(Keywords: Work engagement, esprit de corps, Turnover Intentions, India)
Introduction
Turnover intention refers to chance of leaving the current organization permanently by an employee in near future where as turnover is when an employee actually resigns from an organization permanently (Vandenberg and Nelson, 1999). In the series of withdrawal cognition- stages that finally lead to actual turnover, research has confirmed that intent to leave is the most immediate preceding stage of actual turnover (Tett and Meyer, 1993; Griffeth et al. (2000).
Turnover intentions has been one of the major concerns for business practitioners and research scholars for it leads to number of negative consequences like hiring and training costs, loss of productivity and disruption to work flow (Firth et al., 2004), cost on account of lost sales and management's time (Catherine, 2002) and low morale among existing staff who feel overworked as a reason of turnover (Hendrie, 2004).Although, much research work has been done around the turnover related issues, however, not much has been done around the area reflecting as to why employee intend to leave (Lee and Mitchell, 1994; Morrell et al., 2004).
Employee intent to leave is not only one of the influential drivers of actual turnover, but also the last proceeding cognitive stage of an employee turnover. Therefore, it is worthwhile on the part of research scholars and practitioners to understand causes of turnover intentions and explore ways to...