The Impact of Multiple Commitments on Intentions to Resign: an Empirical Assessment

A number of authors have recently drawn attention to the need to explore, conceptually and empirically, the relationships between different types of employee commitment and work outcomes. Management, continually grappling with the challenge of organizational effectiveness, is often interested in outcomes such as the individual job-performance levels of employees and absenteeism as well as the number of resignations from the organization. One of these, turnover as measured by intentions to resign, and its relationship with multiple commitments in the organization, is the focus of this study. The first objective was to compare the impact of four constituent-specific commitments (commitment to the organization, job, profession and supervisor), termed 'employee commitment', on intentions to resign. Second, the 'key mediating construct' proposition of organizational commitment suggested by Hunt and Morgan (1994) was empirically evaluated. The empirical results show that the impact of commitment to the profession on intentions to resign is the most influential. In addition, the data suggest that neither the 'one of many' model nor the 'key mediating construct' theory of employee commitment can be described as superior in explaining intentions to resign.