Antecedents to Temporary Employee’s Turnover Intentions

Antecedents to Temporary Employee’s Turnover Intentions

Jeffrey P. Slattery*
Northeastern State University-Broken Arrow
3100 East New Orleans
Broken Arrow, OK 74014
918.449.6000 Ext. 6558
Email: [e-mail]

T.T. Rajan Selvarajan
University of Houston-Victoria
School of Business
14000 Univeristy Blvd.
Sugar Land, TX 77479
281.275.3381
Email: [e-mail]

* Address all correspondence to Jeffrey P. Slattery

Running Head: Attecedents to Temporary Employee’s Turnover Intentions

Submitted for possible inclusion in the program for the Organizational Behavior and Organizational Theory track at the March 31-April 2, 2005 Midwest Academy of Management’s Annual Meeting.

Abstract Examining the associations between job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intention among temporary employees was the purpose of this study. Since temporary employees are employed by temporary agencies but perform their work in client organizations to which they are assigned, this study examines temporary employee attitudes in relation to turnover intentions for both the temporary agencies and the client organizations. Based on the extant literature on work attitudes, we proposed a structural model depicting hypothesized associations between job satisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intention for both the temporary agency and client organization. Data was collected from temporary employees who work for a large temporary agency that has franchises throughout the United States. The response rate was 8.6% (n = 1,262). The results, based on structural equation modeling, provide support for nearly all of the hypothesized associations in the model. Concerning the client organization, we found positive associations between job satisfaction and organization commitment and negative associations between job satisfaction and turnover intention and organizational commitment and turnover intention. Similar

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