What happens when the going gets tough? Linking change scepticism, organizational identification, and turnover intentions

ABSTRACT

In times of increasingly turbulent public sector change and frequent career shifts, the relationship between attitudes towards workplace change, organizational identification and turnover intent are highly relevant, but poorly understood. Using data from the Australian Public Service’s (APS) employee survey, this article examines the psychological mechanisms that lead employees to consider leaving their own organization, and the APS as a whole. The combined effect of sceptically perceived workplace change and strong organizational identification leads to an increase in turnover intentions at the organizational level, which testifies to the potentially destructive effect of workplace changes.

KEYWORDS:

• Change scepticism
• organizational identification
• turnover intentions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Further information on the survey methodology is available at: https://www.apsc.gov.au/3-survey-methodologies.

2. Such an indicator is based on the standard deviation of estimated probabilities. See https://www.cmist.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/representative-indicators-for-survey-quality/tools/. For our data the S(ρ) equalled 0,0258 and the R-indicator (M()) is equal to 0.948, indicating that respondents in the subsample do not differ significantly from respondents in the original and representative sample. Note that the logistic regression was only able to correctly specify 56% of the outcomes (pseudo R² of 0.002), further strengthening our belief that our used sample does not differ from the original, representative sample.

3. The rationale for the bivariate coding relates to separating employees on the basis of whether they want to leave rather than when they want to leave. We believe that there is a clear break in terms of ‘intending to leave’ between the first three questions in the survey vs. the remaining two questions (who start with ‘I want to stay’).

4. When using these variables to predict moving out of the APS, regressions fail in doing so (a correct classification of just 56%). However, when using these variables to predict moving out of the current organization they are rather successful (a correct classification of 80%). This ‘crude’ measure supports our ρ finding and shows that these variables are ideally suited as exclusion criteria.

5. As a robustness check, models were run with change scepticism coded as 0 (changes led ‘not at all’ or ‘hardly at all’ to improvements) and 1 for other responses (‘to a very great extent’, ‘quite a lot’, ‘somewhat’). The interaction term remained significant (and even became significant for the model estimating intention to take another job within the APS). The robustness check hence offers support for our previous findings.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [1244720N].

Notes on contributors

Jan Boon

Jan Boon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Antwerp (Belgium).

Jan Wynen

Jan Wynen is a research professor at the Department of Management (Faculty of Business and Economics) at the University of Antwerp (Belgium).

Bjorn Kleizen

Bjorn Kleizen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Antwerp (Belgium).