The end is the beginning – the role of residual affective commitment in former interns’ intention to return and word-of-mouth

Abstract

Interns are ubiquitous in organizations, yet relatively rarely studied, particularly after their temporary organizational membership has ended. Adopting an organizational commitment perspective, we conducted two studies to investigate two important outcomes of former interns’ membership: intention to return to their former employer, and word-of-mouth, that is, promoting the organization as an employer. In Study 1 (N = 436; lagged design), we found that residual affective commitment, that is, the remaining commitment after leaving an organization, related to former interns’ subsequent intention to return and word-of-mouth. In Study 2 (N = 236; cross-sectional design), we replicated our findings, and further found that intention to return was related to (lack of) alternative employment, hiring expectation, and attractiveness of the organization’s location. Location attractiveness also interacted with residual affective commitment on both intention to return and word-of-mouth, albeit in different directions. Overall, our findings suggest that the internship experience relates to future behaviours important for recruiting new (and old) employees. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our studies.

Keywords:

• interns
• intention to return
• word-of-mouth
• organizational commitment
• boomerang employees

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In order to ensure comparability between these groups, we tested a scalar invariance model (e.g., van de Schoot, Lugtig, & Hox, 2012), which did not result in a significant deterioration in model fit (p > .05), indicating that the groups are comparable. We therefore collapsed them into one sample.

2. As in Study 1, we tested for scalar invariance between interns and similar types of former employees and found no significant differences.