The relationship between organisational socialisation and turnover intention and the moderating role of personality traits

Abstract

Turnover costs companies thousands of dollars in recruitment costs and lossof much needed skills annually. It is important that companies ensure that new comers are engaged in the organization as soon as possible so that they don’t quickly decide to leave an organization before the company has benefitted from their knowledge and expertise. This dissertation focuses on the relation between organizational socialization and turnover intention and will also look at how an individual’s personality traits moderate this relationship.This dissertation explores its research aims through an extensive study of relevant literature and the implementation of practical research. The latter was carried out through a survey done using a questionnaire. Three instruments were used in the study namely the organizational socialization inventory byTaormina (1994), the turnover intention scale byCammann ,Fichman, Jenkins and Klesh (1979) and lastly the Big five inventory by John and Srivastava (1999) . The instruments had reliability scores ranging from .72 to .90. A sample of N 90 respondents was obtained using convenient sampling methods. This research produced the following findings: the way an individual is socialized in the organization determines whether they would want to stay in an organization or not. The second finding was that an individual’s personality traits either increases or decrease the link between organisational socialization and the turnover intention decision. Individuals who have high levels of agreeableness and extroversion and openness to experience are most likely to have positive organizational socialization experiences and less likely to have a high turnover intention desire. The main conclusions drawn from this research were that current approaches to organizational socialization approach are deficient because they have a one size fits all approach to the organizational socialization process, instead opting for tailor-made processes which consider an individual’s personality traits.