Psychological contract, career concerns, and retention practices satisfaction of employees: Exploring interaction effect
- PDF / 390,001 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 19 Downloads / 182 Views
Psychological contract, career concerns, and retention practices satisfaction of employees: Exploring interaction effects Alda Deas 1
&
Melinde Coetzee 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Retaining employees is a major concern for higher education institutions which are constantly on the lookout for new and innovative ways of retaining knowledge workers. Previous research has highlighted compensation, training and development opportunities, supervisor support, and career opportunities as important retention factors, especially in the context of higher education (Deas 2017). This study consequently explored the interaction effect between employees’ perceptions of the psychological contract and their career concerns in predicting their satisfaction with organizational retention practices relevant to the higher education context (career opportunities, compensation, supervisor support, training and development opportunities). A cross-sectional sample of 579 participants from a higher education institution in South Africa was used. A hierarchically moderated regression analysis subsequently showed that the influence of negative perceptions of the psychological contract on dissatisfaction with training and development practices are conditional on high levels of career development concerns. Thus, career development concerns act as a moderating variable in the relationship between psychological contract perceptions and satisfaction with training and development opportunities as retention practice. The results of this study bring new insight and valuable knowledge to retention theory that could potentially inform human resource practices for retaining valuable employees. Keywords Psychological contract . Career concerns . Retention practices . Career opportunities . Compensation . Supervisor support . Training and development opportunities
The retention of highly qualified and knowledgeable academic employees in higher education institutions remains an important subject of inquiry owing to fierce competition for these employees (Bernard and Appolonius 2014; Bushe 2012; Erasmus et al. 2015; Hailu et al. 2013; Takawira et al. 2014). Attractive offers from the private sector as well as from other educational institutions intensify the vulnerability of higher education institutions to losing such employees (Erasmus et al. 2015; Ngobeni and Bezuidenhout 2011; Takawira et al. 2014). Despite this trend, which clearly calls for continued research on the factors that affect the retention of academic employees, scholars have observed an overemphasis on turnover intention in research and a scarcity of research on actual employee retention in the higher education context (Theron et al. 2014). * Alda Deas [email protected] 1
Department of Human Resource Management, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
2
Department of Industrial and Organisational Psychology, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
Moreover, studies relating to the retention of employees in hi
Data Loading...
