Job-Leisure Conflict, Turnover Intention and the Role of Job Satisfaction as a Mediator: An Empirical Study of Indian IT Professionals [Dagger]

The Indian IT and ITES industry has witnessed attrition as high as 15% according to Deloitte Human Capital Consulting in its Compensation Trends Survey 2013-14. Hence, the focus of most organizations in this industry is to reduce the turnover intention of employees ultimately resulting into reduction of actual turnover. Finding out all the factors which contribute to the turnover intention among employees is employers' high priority. The aim of this paper is to find out if job-leisure conflict influences the IT professionals' turnover intention. This paper further examines the relationship between job-leisure conflict, job satisfaction and turnover intention for professionals working in IT service provider organizations in India. It is hypothesized that job satisfaction will mediate the relationship between job-leisure conflict and turnover intention. The proposed model is grounded in the social-exchange theory and ideology of individualization. Data were collected from 173 IT professionals. Findings supported a significant positive relationship between job-leisure conflict and turnover intention and significant negative relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intention. It was also confirmed that job satisfaction plays a mediating role between job-leisure conflict and turnover intention. Implications, potential future research areas are discussed.Key Words: Individualism, Job -leisure conflict, Job satisfaction, Social exchange theory, Turnover intentionINTRODUCTIONAccording to a study conducted by Deloitte Human Capital Consulting (Compensation Trends Survey, 2013-14), the Indian IT sector witnessed attrition rate of 15% in 2013. According to the annual report 2010-2011 of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), IT services are responsible for 68% of the total revenue generated by Indian IT industry. Confederation of Indian Industry (2011) has also emphasized the impact of IT industry in India. The industry has directly or indirectly employed more than 2.5 million people, making it one of the biggest job providers in India. According to Gupta and Pandit (2010), IT Industry alone saw 18% attrition rate making retention of critical manpower resources a key challenge for organizations. This data makes it worthwhile to explore the possible factors which make an employee quit his or her organization. It is also suggested that IT professionals command a considerable labor market power, which has enabled them to shift organizations rather being stable in a single organization for a long time (Scholarios and Marks, 2004). The after affects of employee turnover are apparently costly in terms of hiring and training a new employee according to the job role. Organizations also have to incur cost in terms of employ ee's deviant behavior an d consequent sub-optimal work performance during his/her growing intention to quit. Thus, this becomes of paramount importance to understand the factors that instigate employees to think about quitting the organization. Further the consistent intention to quit for a longer time may also be detrimental to the organization as this negatively influence other employees, their work performance and anxiety level.Prevailing research has identified the elements that affect employees' decision to quit (Pare and Tremblay, 2000; Chew and Chan, 2008; and Dupre and Day, 2007). Organiz ation comm i tm e n t , organ i z ation c i tiz en s hip b e havior, H R p r a ct i c e s , compensation and negotiation conditions, job satisfaction, autonomy, stress, leadership, distributive justice, work group cohesion, job content and promotional chances (Griffeth, Hom and Gaertner, 2000) are reported as main antecedents of an employee's turnover. Recent literature has also surfaced work-family conflict and family-work conflict as an influencer of employee's intention to quit (Ahuja, Chudoba, Kacmar, McKnight and George, 2007). Karatepe, Kilic and Isiksel (2008) concluded that both work-family and family-work conflicts lead to turnover intention. …