The effect of job plateau on turnover intention: The role of perceived organizational support, learning self-efficacy, work centrality, ambiguity tolerance, and coaching

Although the literature has paid enough attention to affecting factors of turnover intention, not much attention has been paid to the job plateau comprehensively; even when employees stay in their posts for a long time and few opportunities exist for advancement or increment of responsibilities. This study was aimed at investigating the antecedents of job plateau and its effect on turnover intention moderated by ambiguity tolerance and coaching.

  THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

Most of the studies related to turnover intention are focused on the private sector or have examined healthcare employees. Focusing on public sector organizations, municipalities are selected as the biggest service provider in Iran. Although the number of leavers is low in public organizations such as municipalities, the variable of turnover intention should be investigated because of its potential influence on variables such as commitment, job satisfaction, performance, motivation, organizational engagement, and participation. Given the increasing social pressure to improve the quality of services and considering its large number of staff, municipalities should understand the effects of job plateau on their performance, in terms of both the structure and content. Most of the existing studies have considered the affecting factors of turnover intention and neglected the moderating variables.

The current research is an applied study in terms of purpose, and regarding the method, it is a descriptive survey that describes understudy conditions and phenomena. The research literature was compiled by the library method, and data collection was done by distributing questionnaires. The gathered data was analyzed by structural equation modeling in SmartPLS software. The statistical population was comprised of 2120 experts from municipalities of grades 1 to 7 in the Fars province. Based on Cochran's formula, the sample size was determined to be 325, and the final sample size was 330 people selected by conducting a systematic random sampling method.

The results indicated that perceived organizational support, learning self-efficacy, and structural and content plateau had negative and significant effects on turnover intention. Work concentration negatively affected the structural plateau but not affected the content plateau. Furthermore, coaching negatively moderated the relationship between structural and content plateau with turnover intention. Additionally, ambiguity tolerance positively moderated the relationship between the structural plateau and turnover intention. In general, the research found that employees who are high at ambiguity tolerate the intention to leave the organization by understanding the structural plateau. This finding is not applied to the content plateau.

 CONCLUSIONS & SUGGESTIONS:

Due to the impact of the structural and content plateau on employees' turnover intention, it seems to be necessary for municipalities to revise the employees' career development plans. According to the investigations, for municipal employees, the starting and ending point of job promotion is not clear, the willingness of political individuals and groups precedes the results, and party and group preferences are very influential. Accordingly, the organization of municipalities and rural districts of the country is suggested to revise the employees' career promotion path by determining the expectations and behaviors that cause employees to perform at high levels. The written expectations should be appropriately informed to employees by holding workshops and training courses. This presents clear information to employees, allows them to define achievable goals for themselves, and improves the subjective criteria of success in the employees' minds. Therefore, it is predicted that this affects the plateau phenomenon and, consequently, the intention to leave the organization.