JOB SATISFACTION, ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT, TURNOVER INTENTION, AND TURNOVER: PATH ANALYSES BASED ON META-ANALYTIC FINDINGS

Cross-study differences in the contributions of work attitudes to the turnover process led us to (a) estimate the six relations among job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intention/withdrawal cognitions, and turnover using meta-analysis; (b) assess the effects of several psychometric moderators on those relations; and (c) compare the influences of satisfaction and commitment in the turnover process by applying path analysis to the meta-analytic correlations. Based on aggregations involving a total of 178 independent samples from 155 studies, results showed that (a) satisfaction and commitment each contribute independently to the prediction of intention/cognitions; (b) intention/cognitions are predicted more strongly by satisfaction than by commitment; (c) intention/cognitions mediate nearly all of the attitu-dinal linkage with turnover; and (d) attitudinal contributions to the turnover process vary with the use of single- versus multi-item scales, the 9- versus 15-item version of the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, and turnover intention versus withdrawal cognition scales.     

ON USING RESIDUAL DIFFERENCE SCORES IN THE MEASUREMENT OF CONGRUENCE: THE CASE OF MET EXPECTATIONS RESEARCH

Despite meta-analytic support for the met expectations hypothesis, Irving and Meyer (1994, 1995) suggested that methodological problems such as the use of difference scores and retrospective measures of met expectations have resulted in an overstatement of this support. In a recent article, Hom, Griffeth, Palich, and Bracker (1998) simultaneously tested several potential psychological mediating mechanisms of realistic job preview (RJP) effects. These authors suggested that met expectations is a critical mediating mechanism, having direct effects on job satisfaction and indirect effects on organizational commitment, withdrawal cognitions, and actual turnover through job satisfaction and other mediating mechanisms such as coping efficacy and perceived employer honesty. However, they used "residual gain scores" to measure met expectations. In this article, we demonstrate that the use of residual scores for the purposes of operationalizing met expectations creates the same problemsas does the use of difference scores a technique that has been widely criticized in the literature.