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Introduction
Employee turnover in emerging economies, such as China, has drawn increasing attention in labor literature (Liu et al., 2013; Xiao and Cooke, 2012; Yuan et al., 2014). In the past, most organizations in China relied on government allocations of labor to meet their development requirement. Owing to the economic liberation and transition toward market systems, China has gradually changed its policies to improve the competence of the workforce and labor movement (Xiao, 2006). This leads organizations in China to face the choice of recruiting externally or training internally (Benson and Zhu, 2002) and make high rate of labor movement become a substantial career development problem for organizations in China (Xiao, 2006; Xiao and Cooke, 2012). In China, the reported actual staff turnover rate is above 16 per cent, which is higher than that of most mature economies, and the average tenure of middle to senior executives in joint ventures is only from 8 to 12 months (Gong et al., 2011). Under this condition, organizations in China should face the rapid turnover of staff and the shortage of middle-level managers and talents (Gong et al., 2011). The potential high costs related to an employee’s leave make the research on the cause of voluntary employee turnover become critical and necessary in China (Wei, 2009).
Some scholars have applied the cognition-based perspective to investigate the aspect of thinking of searching, thinking of quitting and intention to search (Hom and Griffeth, 1991), and some have used the affect-based perspective to highlight the importance of employee job satisfaction (Wright and Bonett, 2007). Empirical evidence supports the negative effects of job satisfaction on voluntary turnover in either mature or emerging economies (Chen et al., 2011; Eddleston, 2009; Trevor, 2001; Villar-Rubio et al., 2015). However, a careful literature review reveals that the existing job satisfaction research has two limitations, especially in the context of China. First, although some studies indicate that job satisfaction is a multi-dimensional concept, few studies have distinguished job satisfaction in the context of employee turnover. Indeed, previous turnover research normally focuses on job satisfaction with one dimension, which includes the thoughts and beliefs of employees regarding work conditions, opportunities and outcomes, namely, the cognitive job satisfaction (CJS) (Ding and Lin, 2006)....