Influence of role stress on employees' turnover intention in hotel industry: job satisfaction and task performance as mediators

Job turnover is commonly faced by organisations in many industries. Implications such as resources wastage and low productivity are often derived from turnover issues. Significantly, turnover intention is found as the best predictor for actual turnover in previous studies. This extends some insights on turnover intention in Malaysia context. The number of hotels in Malaysia increases year by year due to the booming tourism industry. However, employees’ turnover intention continues to rise. This phenomenon is alarming because it affects organisational growth, profitability and customer satisfaction. This study examines the influence of stress role on employees’ turnover intention in the hotel industry, imposing job satisfaction and task performance as mediators and demographic factors as moderators which can implicate the relationship between the role of stress and job satisfaction as well as on task performances. An integrated turnover process model with one predicting variable (role stress), two mediating variables (job satisfaction and task performance) and moderating factors (gender, age, education and marital status) are presented in this study based on the job of characteristics model and Herzberg theory. In addition, this study attempts to model the differing relationships among the studied variables based on five different departments (front office, food and beverage/kitchen, housekeeping, sales and marketing and human resource). Data was collected by using self-administered surveys from a total of 220 employees from eight five-star rated hotels in the East-Coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Descriptive, exploratory factor analysis, reliability, correlation, multiple regression analysis and hierarchical regression analysis were conducted to analyze the data. Findings showed that the role conflict, role load and job satisfaction are significantly related to turnover intention but role ambiguity and task performance did not have any significant relationship with turnover intentions. On the other hand, job satisfaction was found to have fully mediated the relationship between role of ambiguity and turnover intention; however, task performance did not mediate the relationship. Practical implications and avenues for future research are discussed.