Understanding turnover intent of workers in a revolving door: the case of the call center industry in the Philippines.

Abstract

The primary purpose of the dissertation was to examine the roles of customer-related, organizational, and psychological variables in a process that lead to the turnover intent of workers in the call centers in the Philippines where the attrition rates were high. The current study proposed a turnover intent model. The model followed the input-process-output structure. In the model, perceived customer unfriendliness and strategic deception were the input variables hypothesized to affect six first-degree process variables, namely task interdependence, leader-member exchange, person-job fit, perceived stress, emotional dissonance, and cognitive dissonance. The six variables, in turn, were posited to affect the second-degree process variable affective commitment and the output variable turnover intent. Affective commitment was also hypothesized to affect turnover intent and mediate the effects of the first­degree variables on turnover intent. The hypothesized relationships in the model were analyzed via structural equation modeling (SEM) using a sample of 689 call center agents working in eight call centers in the country. The results of the hypotheses testing revealed that perceived customer unfriendliness has adverse effects on task interdependence and leader-member exchange, while it has positive effects on perceived stress, emotional dissonance, and cognitive dissonance. On the other hand; the input variable strategic deception has a negative impact on task interdependence and positive effects on perceived stress, emotional dissonance, and cognitive dissonance. In tum, task interdependence affects affective commitment positively and turnover intent negatively; while perceived str.ess, emotional dissonance, and cognitive dissonance affect affective commitment negatively and turnover intent positively. Leader-member exchange and person-job fit have positive effects on affective commitment; however, their impacts on turnover intent are insignificant. Affective commitment is a direct antecedent of turnover intent. Furthermore, it partially mediates the effects of task interdependence, perceived stress, emotional dissonance, and cognitive dissonance on turnover intent. Also, it fully mediates the effect of leader-member exchange on turnover intent. The findings are expected to make valuable contributions to the literature and the Philippine call center industry. Overall, the results provide insightful information about current issues and factors that have significant associations with the formation of turnover intent of call center workers. The results have several valuable implications that are helpful to the workers and the call centers. These implications include the development of intervening programs that will help call center agents improve personally and professionally and lessen the likelihood of developing high turnover intent. The study also has several methodological and substantive limitations, and recommendations for future research are given.