Need Satisfactions and Employee Turnover

Abstract

Summary In this study we establish the fact that the degree of satisfaction of certain personal needs supplied by a person's place of employment has a significant direct relationship to his continuing to work for that company. These personal needs are for recognition, for autonomy, for a feeling of doing work that is important, and for evaluation by fair standards. In addition, knowing important people in the organization is related to continued employment. There are some indications that anxiety develops in those employees who state that their needs for autonomy and fair evaluation are not satisfied. In addition to the degree of need satisfaction provided by the job, we examined the degree to which the employment situation limits satisfactions which the worker can receive from his family and from his community. We found that the extent to which the job interferes with family and community satisfactions is related to turnover as strongly as the failure to receive need satisfactions on the job. But interference with off‐the‐job sources of satisfaction is not related to experiencing dissatisfaction on the job. We interpret these results to mean that there are two essentially different kinds of reasons for leaving the employing organization. Some people resign for reasons of both kinds: the job itself does not satisfy needs, and it also keeps them from receiving satisfactions from other sources. Most of the people in this study who resigned, how‐ ever, felt only one or the other of these two forms of dissatisfaction. (The interference with off ‐the‐job satisfactions is probably higher among the people studied than in the popula‐ tion at large since shift work is prevalent in the industry in which this study was conducted.)

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