Perceptions of Organizational Politics and Cooperation as Moderators of the Relationship between Job Strains and Intent to Turnover

Employees are recognized as a very important organizational asset. Ultimately, firms invest considerable capital in the human resources. Organizational cost incurred due to employees quitting their jobs and the subsequent hiring of replacement personnel (Darmon, 1990), new-hire training (Smith and Watkins, 1978), and general costs for administration (Hom and Griffeth, 1995) can be tremendous in terms of personal, work-unit and organizational re-adjustments (e.g., Hom and Griffeth, 1995; Lee and Mitchell, 1994). Thus, voluntary employee turnover is an important organizational issue that merits thorough exploration. Although it is recognized that people leave their jobs for a variety of reasons, there is consistent research evidence indicating that voluntary turnover can be explained by employees' intention to leave the organization. In investigations of turnover, actual voluntary turnover measures are extremely difficult to obtain; therefore, intentions to turnover are used in the high majority of turnover studies, as these intentions are the only antecedent that has been consistently found to be a direct antecedent to actual turnover (e.g., Griffeth et al., 2000; Hom and Griffeth, 1995; Michaels and Spector, 1982). Like these prior works, this study explores voluntary turnover by focusing on the potential impact of employees' intentions to leave the organization. The prediction and understanding of employee turnover has been studied from many different perspectives (e.g., Dougherty et al., 1985). Most of the past studies have focused on single direct antecedents and examined their roles in the context of process models of turnover. Job stressors and the resulting strains (Beehr, 1995; Jex, 1998) have been identified as major contributors to voluntary turnover and have ultimately been blamed for the loss of employees. On the other hand, many models acknowledge that negative affective reactions (such as job strains) do not necessarily cause individuals to actually quit and have attempted to improve their predictive ability by incorporating factors outside the individual (Lachman and Diamant, 1987). Specifically, the traditional view of role stress (a negative affective reaction) acknowledges that individuals may react in various ways and adopt a variety of withdrawal behaviors. For example, it is believed that persons experiencing job stress may avoid the work situation by being chronically late, leaving the job, or may not experience any withdrawal factors depending on other related factors (Kahn et al., 1964). Consequently, researchers have attempted to better understand these variations by considering the effects of external variables such as job alternatives, social support, and the quality of leader-member exchange (LMX) relationships (Vecchio, 1985). Despite these variations, the strain-turnover relationship is well established (e.g., Parasuraman, 1982; Sager et al., 1989) and can have negative bottom-line consequences for an organization. Thus, it remains important to investigate how other variables influence this relationship. Specifically, other variables often provide additional insight and/or clarification into the exact nature of how the variables interact. The intention of this study is to examine situational variables that might affect the strain-intent to turnover relationship. In particular we are interested in understanding variables that have the potential to buffer and/or intensify the impact of strain on employees' intentions to leave the organization (Ganster et al., 1986). The variables of interest in the study are perceptions of politics (POPs) and workplace cooperation. We expect that by studying buffers and amplifiers of strain's impact on turnover intentions, we can gain a better understanding of internal organizational dynamics that affect individuals and organizations as a whole. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate how POPs and workplace cooperation moderate the relationship between job strains and turnover intentions. …