Identify factors for lower hierarchical employee turnover : a case study from a hospital

Abstract

Employee turnover is a significant challenge for Human Resource Management (HRM) and organizational performance. Employees are the key to success in the business world. Therefore, organizations invest considerable time and money to train and develop the employees.Though many studies were carried out to find the reasons for lower hierarchical employee turnover in many countries, no such work related to this study has been reported in Sri Lanka. The main purpose of this study is therefore to determine the factors that influence the lower hierarchical employee turnover in the healthcare industry and recommend strategies on how an organization can retain employees or reduce employeeturnover. A sample size of 300 respondents was selected from five sections of the hospital to gather information through a structured questionnaire. It was allocated proportionally among five strata. Stratified random sampling technique method was used to pick up respondents for this study.Descriptive statistics, such as mean, median and mode was used to analyze data. In addition, factor analysis was used to analyze the collected data in order to outlinethe major factors supposed to be influencing on employee turnover in healthcare industry. Of the variables related to job attributes four sub factors namely “job satisfaction”, “professional development”, “work commitment” and “job descriptions” were found to be significant. Similarly, of the variables related to organizational attributes again four factors were identified namely “personal values”, “reliable”, “management” and “confidence” and that for environmental attributes, “stay factors”, “push factors” and “still factors” were found to be significant on employee turnover. The results indicated that low salary and remuneration packages, lack of recognition, lack of opportunity to grow and poor working conditions were key factors in determining the employee turnover. It is therefore recommended that, the management should pay attention to bothhygiene factors and motivation factors and start employee retention programs.