Job insecurity, career opportunities, discrimination and turnover intention in post-apartheid South Africa: examples of informative hypothesis testing

Abstract

The objective of this paper was to investigate differences in male employee experiences in the light of employment equity law and a strong affirmative action drive within present-day South African organizations. This research is important as it can substantiate or invalidate perspectives and beliefs surrounding employment equity issues. A cross-sectional design was used which consisted of a stratified random sample from five corporate organizations (N = 1000). Latent variable modeling with Bayesian estimation was implemented. This paper also demonstrated the use of informative hypothesis testing and subsequent Bayes factors to directly compare the informative hypotheses, in order to show how much more likely one hypothesis is to be the correct hypothesis, compared to the other(s). The results revealed that non-designated (white male) employees experience more job insecurity than their designated (black male) counterparts, but this does not necessarily associate with more turnover intention. It was also found that when designated employees experience less career opportunities, they show more turnover intention. Furthermore, it was shown that designated employees perceive more discrimination, but that this does not associate with more turnover intention. The limitations and future research opportunities are discussed.

Keywords::

• affirmative action
• Bayes factors
• employment equity
• informative hypothesis
• structural equation modeling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.