Relationship of transformational leadership and turnover intention in start-up.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to test out the relation between four transformational leader elements and employee turnover intention in a small start-up company in Bangkok Thailand. The method was to collect questionnaires from all employees in the start-up company about how they think about their CEO and which level they are at turnover intention using Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire form 6S (MLQ-6) to measure the employees point of view about CEO's transformational leader and Turnover Intention Statement (TIS-6) to measure the employee's turnover intention level. Then analyzed to find the relationship of the four elements with turnover intent by Pearson's correlation and linear regression to find out if the four elements can predict the employees' turnover intention. The finding of this paper is two out of four elements which are inspirational motivation and idealized influence have a weak correlation with turnover intention and the four elements of transformational leadership cannot predict the employee turnover level. The research found that when segment the employees by age, gender, job position, and job tenure, the result has shown the evidence of different expectation for a leader from different groups.