Testing for Invariance of Employee Turnover Intention Model: Multi-Group Comparison Between Knowledge Workers and Traditional Staff

Employee turnover is one of the most durable issues in both organizational behavior research and human resource management practice. Although a great deal of employee turnover models has been well established, much of these researches have not considered the differences between occupation groups. In an effort to fill this theoretical gap, the present study attempted to provide an examination of a turnover intention model and some of the predictors across two groups: knowledge workers and traditional staff, and then distinguished their different influencing mechanisms on employee turnover intention. This study used multi-group structural equation modeling techniques as a cross-validation procedure to investigate whether the proposed model remained stable across two samples. The empirical examination was also conducted. The results based on 606 employees´ responses from two occupational categories indicate that four antecedents are significantly associated with employee turnover intention mediated by job satisfaction and organizational commitment. This study finds the model with an adequate level of configural invariance across two groups. However, the corresponding regression weights are significantly different. The findings suggest that both researchers and practitioners should take into consideration not only the organizational factors, but also the occupational type while exploring the process of employee turnover.