To leave or not to leave: When receiving interpersonal citizenship behavior influences an employee’s turnover intention

Abstract

Given that few studies have examined relational bases for voluntary employee turnover, the purpose of the article is to examine whether work relationships explain employee turnover intention. Adopting a social relational perspective on employee turnover, we investigated the effect of receiving interpersonal citizenship behavior (ICB) from coworkers on the recipient’s turnover intention. We hypothesized that the association between receiving ICB from coworkers and turnover intention would be mediated by job satisfaction and moderated by employees’ communion-striving motivation and task interdependence. We tested our hypotheses regarding moderated mediation in a sample of 149 hospital nurses. The results show that there is an indirect (through job satisfaction) and negative effect of receiving ICB on turnover intention provided communion-striving motivation and task interdependence were high, but not when these were low. This study has implications for research and offers managers insights into task situations and employee characteristics that influence the importance of receiving ICB from coworkers.